The shortest day of the year!

By Al Lowe
Contributor

As the earth makes its majestic circle around the sun, it gives us the seasons.
I bet a lot of you here in the north figure that the earth gets cold because it is further from the sun in the winter - right? Well, dead wrong! As a matter of fact, the earth is closer to the sun during our winter than it is in the summer. How can this be?
The real cause of the seasons is the tilt of the earth. If you could look at the sun and the earth together, you would see that the earth is tilted away from its north/south axis by about 23 1/2 degrees. So, as the earth rotates around the sun, the sun's rays do not fall with the same strength on all parts of the surface.
In the summer, the northern hemisphere is tilted towards the sun, which means that the rays fall on us fairly directly. The sun feels hot, the earth gets nice and warm, and all those good things happen. But in the winter, we are tilted away from the sun, so the rays fall on us at a much more oblique angle. We start to cool off, and then we get cold - sometimes really cold. Note that it is the exact opposite in the southern hemisphere.
On one certain day, our part of the earth receives the least amount of sunlight. This is called the Winter Solstice. On this day (Dec 21 or 22) the sun appears to be as low on the southern horizon as it can get.
All the ancient civilizations knew about the earth's motion around the sun and the special days - the equinoxes and the solstices. They knew that the sun governed the seasons, and therefore agriculture and their food supply. Most of them had big celebrations on December 22, because they knew that the days were going to start getting longer - and spring would come eventually.
Stonehenge, with its huge upright stones, was really an observatory, which could pinpoint, almost to the second, the special days of both the sun and the moon. There are many ancient temples to the sun, in Mexico, Cambodia, the Mediterranean, and almost all over the world.
Another very special day happens near the solstice, and that is the birth of Jesus. Back in 350 A.D., Pope Julius First declared that December 25th should be the official Christmas Day. And so it has been ever since.
But over the centuries, many of the pagan celebrations were integrated into the celebration of Christmas. The Germanic tribes, the Romans and the Druids all used evergreen trees for decoration. We still do that today.
The giving of gifts was adopted into the Christmas tradition. Lights became another Christian symbol, the feast of St. Lucia, and the stringing of lights on a tree. So our Christmas contains many customs adapted from those civilizations of long, long ago.
Along with all of our Christian celebrations, we can also be very thankful that the shortest day of the year has gone by. The solstice is past, and we are sure to get warmth and sunlight - some day!