Winter Solstice

As this paper goes to press it is the summer solstice in Australia. Here, it is the winter solstice, December 21, 2011. You may have noticed that the sun is not straight overhead at noon. No, the sun now twinkles at a height only 30° above the horizon.

It is of course, the shortest day of the year (unless you concede to last minute Christmas shopping, then for you it may feel like the longest day of the year). The good news is that on December 24, the last shopping day, you will have more sunlight as the days now ever so slowly lengthen. On the solstice, the sun will set at 5:03 p.m., and on the 24th, the day lengthens with sunset at 5:04 p.m.

Romans started the new year on the winter solstice, December 21. That is, until Julius Caesar and his clique of modernizers decided to reform the calendar to begin on the first of January. Reaction to the immoral excesses of the heathens, too lurid to mention in a newspaper whose readers' morals may descend from such traditions, sparked January 1 as the day on which to celebrate Christ's circumcision.

This feast day (or fasting day) of January 1 is canonized in Canon 17 of a Council said to have met in Tours in 567, "to tread under foot the customs of the heathen, our fathers ordained that private litanies should be held at the beginning of January, psalms sung in the churches, and at the eighth hour of the first of the month, the Mass of the Circumcision, pleasing to God." It must have also pleased the long-departed Caesar observing from a realm that surely was not heaven as his wretched excesses of celebration began on the same day.

The tradition of gift giving at this time of year arrived before Christianity when emperors of old celebrated the new year by extracting gifts from their subjects, just like Congress exhorts the poor and middle class to enhance the coffers of their wealthy patrons. "We deem it for your own good."

The history of human nature is instructive, is it not? Thus, as we prepare for our ritual celebrations, let us respect that they began in ancient traditions, religious observations, and heathen joys dating to the most primitive human rituals honoring the winter solstice -- or as Australian aborigines say, the first day of summer.