{"id":2516,"date":"2004-12-21T08:46:45","date_gmt":"2004-12-21T16:46:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2004\/12\/21\/2516.html"},"modified":"2004-12-21T08:46:45","modified_gmt":"2004-12-21T16:46:45","slug":"happy-solstice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2004\/12\/21\/happy-solstice\/","title":{"rendered":"Happy solstice!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>The winter solstice was this morning at 4:42 a.m. my time.  I admire those who stay up all night for solstice, but I prefer to celebrate it by sleeping.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, the good news is that our days will now start getting longer again.  It's about time.<\/p>\n<p>(The bad news is that the days will start getting shorter for folks in the southern hemisphere.  But I'm not sure if anyone in the southern hemisphere reads this.)<\/p>\n<p>A couple of useful resources for solstice and equinox dates and times: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.erh.noaa.gov\/er\/box\/equinox.html\">US Naval Observatory list<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.stellafane.com\/moon_phase\/equinox.htm\">Stellafane Equinox &amp; Solstice Calculator<\/a> (which, alas, still has a timezone bug in Safari).  Oh, and in case you're wondering, <a href=\"http:\/\/aa.usno.navy.mil\/faq\/docs\/longest_day.html\">the shortest day is longer than the shortest night<\/a>, by that definition of \"day\" and \"night\".  Looks like today I'm still getting nine and a half hours of daylight, so I suppose I shouldn't complain.<\/p>\n<p>Last year, Chaos pointed me to Susan Cooper's poem \"<a href=\"http:\/\/www.thelostland.com\/shortest.htm\">The Shortest Day<\/a>,\" which I'll quote my favorite bit of again here:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<div class=\"stanza\">\n<p>As promise wakens in the sleeping land:<\/p>\n<p>They carol, feast, give thanks,<\/p>\n<p>And dearly love their friends,<\/p>\n<p>And hope for peace.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>(Hey, I just saw that Susan Cooper lives in Connecticut.  Does she get invited to conventions?)<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The winter solstice was this morning at 4:42 a.m. my time. I admire those who stay up all night for&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2516","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2516","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2516"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2516\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2516"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2516"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2516"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}