Solstice 2002

What do you call it when the sunset comes before the sunrise?

By Bryan Zepp Jamieson
12/20/02

Well, nuts.

Each year, I write an essay that revolves around the winter solstice, and I usually work it around the cliché, “it’s always darkest before the dawn.” I decided I wasn’t going to do that this year because…well, it was starting to feel stale to me, and if I was getting tired of it, than by now my readers must be slinging nooses over the highest limbs of their Christmas trees with the vain hope that Saint Nick would appear and help them hang themselves before they had to read the same thing AGAIN.

But boy, if there was ever a year where that message were germane, this is it.

OK. “It’s always darkest before the dawn.” Don’t lose hope. Never lose hope. OK?

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, maybe I should explain for the benefit of folks in Hawaii or Kenya or one of those strange warm places why anyone would even CARE about the solstice.

I lived, as a kid, in some fairly northern latitudes. (I’ve got it easy now, living as I do at 39 North, where even on the shortest day we get about nine hours of sunlight. When it’s not cloudy, which is rare.). I lived in various parts of Canada, but the furthest north I lived was Scotland, which is so far north that we shared the same area code with Bjork and Santa Claus. Scottish weather is much like the residents dour and sodden and in the winter in late December, it wouldn’t even begin to get light until 8 in the morning, and it would be full dark by 4:30. (Twilights were about an hour and a half long). So you were in school from dark until dark, and if that doesn’t seem bad, you were never in a Scottish school in the 50s. There are some places no amount of sunshine can make cheery.

In latitudes like that, the favorite indoor sport in the winter is suicide, followed closely by getting pissed on Guy Fawkes day and staying that way until Easter. The solstice was considered a good time to go and put up a tree in the living room, sling a rope over it, and hang yourself. These weren’t options for young kids, so we learned to sublimate our existential despair into months-long games of Monopoly, Parcheesi, and Snakes and Ladders. (The further from the equator you go, the worse it gets, especially since those furthest away all feature a climate even more inhospitable than northern Scotland. Above the arctic circle, winter suicide and deaths from alcohol poisoning are significant
social problems during the dark months.)

What balances it out, of course, is that there are TWO solstices. The summer solstice in the far north is glorious. In Scotland, sunrise was around 3:30 am, and sunset sometime after 11:15. My mates told me it never got completely dark at night in late June, and so one night in June, at the age of seven, I stayed up and watched. Sure enough. There was a persistent glow on the southern horizon, and at the darkest time of night, only a few of the brighter stars were visible.

When you’re a kid it’s a lot of fun, going out to play on dewy lawns three hours before the rest of the world wakes up. If folks in the southern latitudes miss the gloom and cold of the winter, they also miss the glory and wonder of the emerging spring. I’ve lived in places where the solstice was little more than a curiosity for astronomy nerds, and “winter” consisted of nights in the 40s, and rain. I’ll take the variation any time. When you live in a place with seasons, you live each season looking forward to the next.

My Dad would tell me of how they had something called “Double War Time” during World War II in which the clocks were pushed ahead by TWO hours.

Supposedly this was to save electricity, but since, clocks advanced or not, it was going to be light when people got up and light when they went to bed, I didn’t really see the point in it. But in Scotland, it had the effect of pushing the sunset to after midnight for a few weeks each year. I imagine that made for a distinctly odd looking “daily almanac” section in the local newspaper.

Living in the western mountains, of course, seasons can be pretty anarchistic. I’ve seen it reach 70 degrees in December, and back in 1987, the town got six inches of snow on the Fourth of July. I remember when I was scouting around for a place to rent for our first year up here, I asked the realtor what sort of winter to expect. “Snowy” he replied. “We have a full four-season climate here.” “Full four-season climate” is Realtorese for “the winters can be a bear” but that’s ok. Winter doesn’t scare me.

A couple of years later, I ran into him, and after chatting for a bit, I said, “Say, John, you remember telling me when we were house hunting about how Mt. Shasta has a full four-season climate?” He remembered. “Well, John, you forgot to tell me that we were liable to see all four seasons in any given week.” He got a kick out of that.

He also had told me that the old-timers could tell me tales of snow falls reaching up to the eaves of homes. He said that didn’t happen any more, not since Shasta Lake was created. (A local belief is that the presence of the lake, some 40 miles away, warmed and moistened our climate, and in fact, it is substantially warmer and wetter than it was as recently as the 1960s. But I doubt it’s the lake that caused that). I got to see the “snow up to the eaves” phenomenon for myself in 1993, when we got a fourteen foot snowfall over thirty-six hours. OK. Winter doesn’t scare me, but sometimes it can be sorta disconcerting.

People are always puzzled that I like it that we switch back to standard time at the end of October. The reason is purely personal. The early sunsets don’t bother me, but I always hated getting up when it was pitch black out. It’s a kind of a bleak and lonely way to start the day. And I’m naturally an early riser, usually waking up about 5:45. I don’t even own an alarm clock, and I’ve overslept for work exactly once in the past 30 years. In mid October, it is dark at 5:45 by about the 15th. But then, when the clock are set back, I get a respite of about three weeks before the inexorable creep of the seasons again shrouds my mornings in darkness. Due to precession, the mornings don’t even start getting earlier until about January 5th, so it’ll just keep getting darker for a while yet.

Notice how I slipped in the idea that it’s darkest before the dawn even after saying I wouldn’t? Pretty sly of me. Hell, I even tricked myself on that one!

It’s fun to do a web search on cultural attitudes toward the solstice. Every culture notes it. Even on the equator, the solstice marks the end point of the solar drift to the north or south of due east or west, twenty three and a half degrees in each direction, even though the length of the days stays the same; 12 hours. The further from the equator you get, the more lurid and entertaining the mythology of the solstice becomes, and it’s a major even in most world religions, including Christianity. (Jesus, if he ever existed, was probably born in late summer. Christians moved his birth to coincide with solstice holidays and adopted most of the solstice trappings, including the decorated tree, the fireplace log, and the potlatch, all derive from pagan solstice celebrations). Even American secular Xmas trappings the spirit moving about in the night dispensing gifts, the songs, have solstice beginnings. Every so often I hear a Christian complaining about how Christmas has been stolen by the rest of society and turned into a carnevale. Not quite true. The rest of us just took it BACK, is all. Solstice has always been a time to celebrate the promise of the return of the sun.

By the time you reach 66 33′ north, solstice involves dragons eating the sun and sicking it back up, and coyote gods laughing as they piss it out. The Promethean god arises, and smites the jester or the dragon, and the sun returns to his pregnant bride, still not showing.

There’s probably billions of inhabitable planets in the universe, and it’s quite possible that there is one, somewhere, that has no axial tilt to its primary, and no particular orbital eccentricity, so variations in climate and length of day are unknown to them. If such a planet had people anything like us, they might have speculative fiction writers who might observe that other planets in their system had an axial tilt, and wonder what it would mean if theirs had one. They might envision seasons, and any that have a solid background in geometry and calculus would figure out the variations in sunrise and sunset.

But would any of them guess at the elaborate and fantastic myths that have sprung up in so many cultures here, and would any of them guess at the profound effects on the human psyche the tilt, with its progression of days and season, has?

Happy Solstice.

Don’t lose hope. Never lose hope.