21 December—With the winter solstice having occurred at 10:59 this morning, you may wonder what the winter solstice is. So do I. But first, let me revel in philological pedantry. The word “winter,” you don’t want to know, is every bit as English as the queen, whose family is actually German. English “winter” is cognate with and similar and even identical to other Germanic words for the season, all going back to the conjectural Indo-European word for “wet,” as in “water.” It’s been nasalized, of course, which adds the “n” sound. But that degree of pedantry exceeds the bounds of my conveniently hypoactive ADD.

“Solstice,” on the other hand, is from the Latin “solstitium” (or “solsticium” in mediæval Latin), meaning “the sun has stood still,” from “sol,” which everybody knows, and the past participle of “sistere.”

In simple terms, then—the only terms I can understand—at the winter solstice, Earth’s northern hemisphere is tilted as far away from the sun as it ever gets (until some cataclysm comes along, probably caused by global warming), meaning that we on the top side of the equator have the shortest period of light and the longest period of dark of the year.

That raises another question: Why is the northern hemisphere on top and the southern hemisphere on bottom? Easy. Most of our geographic and astronomical terms and conventions, it seems, were developed—some even in prehistoric times—in the northern hemisphere. Astronomers in the good old days observed that Polaris, the north star, which doesn’t rise or set, was “up” in the night sky. Thus, north on the top became the convention.

So, harking back to yesterday’s sermon, wherein a more accurate birth date for Jesus was discussed, why can’t Christmas be a geographically moveable feast? Jesus was born in June, after all, right around the winter solstice down under. Santa wouldn’t need to wear short pants and Christmas in June would allow Santa’s reindeer to do their thing in the southern hemisphere as capitalism intended.

Getting back to our winter solstice in the northern hemisphere, the good news is that from today the days will get longer until the summer solstice on 21 June 2022—the longest period of light and the shortest period of dark of the year—at which time they’ll start getting shorter until the next winter solstice. And so forth, days without end. Amen.

Then there are the equinoxes, from the Latin meaning “equal nights,” which I’ll blather about on 21 March for the vernal and 23 September for the autumnal. If I remember . . .