Tonight is the longest night of the year. It will begin when the sun sets at one minute past four o’clock this afternoon and it will end at 08:11 tomorrow morning. The winter solstice, the exact moment at which the north pole is tilted as far away from the sun as it will go this year, will be at 03:27 in the morning. Tomorrow will be the shortest day.
We have been able to calculate the turn of the year for millennia. Some of our oldest monuments, anywhere between five and six thousand years old, are aligned with the winter solstice.
While we make all sorts of melodramatic assumptions about the religious beliefs that prompted the building of, for instance, Stonehenge, we forget that in the western, Christian world, we still hold our most significant religious festival in the middle of winter. We still celebrate the turning of the year with ceremonies and excesses that might well date back to the times in which Stonehenge was built.
The winter solstice was and still is the point at which we are reassured that the cold and the dark will end – and we are not yet far enough away from our neolithic ancestors to greet the event with anything but relief and self indulgence. Enjoy!
Southwick Country Park Nature Reserve 