For the past several weeks there has been great anticipation expressed about the Winter Solstice.  More than usual, as far as I’m concerned.  At least three of our friends mentioned that they were hosting or going to a Solstice Party.  And many conversations yesterday centered around the delight in having made it to the ‘longer days’ period of the year.

In actuality, of course, today is only 8 seconds longer than yesterday was.  Tomorrow it will be a few seconds more than that and so on.  If things are as usual, it will still feel like a ‘long winter’s night’ to us well into February.  Truth to tell, we first notice the difference in the length of days when the chickens begin staying up later.  They’re more in tune with the nuances of light than we are.

But, I’m still curious as to why this year more attention is being paid to the Winter Solstice than I’ve been aware of in the past. Sometimes I think that a buzz around something reaches ‘critical mass’ for some reason and then we all become hyper aware of whatever it is.  Either that or I’ve been totally oblivious for three-quarters of a century.

Not that I don’t know about solstices and equinoxes.  I think that was part of the fifth or sixth grade school curriculum back in the 1940s.  And for all these years, I’ve been aware of which days they fall on and their significance.  But, like our chickens, it doesn’t really sink in until it’s light when that alarm goes off at five a.m. and still light when I go to bed at nine p.m.  I don’t really think an eight or nine second gain each day is all that significant.  Not party material.

Or, maybe it’s the media coverage surrounding the recently (December 18^th) opened multi-million dollar Visitor Centre at Stonehenge that has caused people to focus on the solstice.  Even though no one knows for sure, it seems clear that the famous Neolithic stones (like other similar sites throughout the world) served as a sort of prehistoric calendar and were important in the observance of both the summer and winter solstices.

I wonder if those people of 3,000 to 1,500 years ago had chickens.  And I wonder if they relied on them, as we do, to keep them apprised of the time of day.  It would have been easier than hauling those huge stones around.  Or maybe those Bronze Age folks were just into solstice parties, too.  Go figure