Blinded by the Light

The Winter Solstice heralds the return of the sun but is there a cost to the all those hours of light?

Something important is going to happen in the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore tomorrow (Thursday, December 21, 2023). No trumpets will blare, no speeches are planned, no fireworks will punctuate the occasion. It will be a quiet miracle, I suspect. But don’t be fooled. Despite the lack of fanfare, this will be an event of monumental consequence: in the Apostle Islands the sun will stand still.

This Thursday marks the Winter Solstice, the moment that the sun reaches its lowest point in the sky for those of us in the northern hemisphere with the earth tilted at 23.5 degrees on its axis.

(Illustration courtesy of the Farmer’s Almanac)

With its name taken from the Latin “sol” (sun) and “sistere” (to stand still), the Winter Solstice is an auspicious event, one that has been celebrated and marked for centuries by northern cultures — Soyal, the winter solstice celebration of the Hopi Indians of northern Arizona which included gift-giving and purification rites; the Persian festival Yalda, or Shab-e Yalda of Iran where the victory of the sun over the darkness is honored with special foods and staying up all night to welcome the new sunrise; even the tradition of burning a yule log during the winter solstice which is believed to date all the way back to early Germanic or Scandinavian paganism to help ensure the sun’s return.

Beyond the celebrations and traditions, noon the sun will barely top the tallest tree tops here in the islands, its lowest elevation of the season. It will seem to hover there, getting no higher for a few days (hence the “standing still” part of the name) before turning its course and beginning its slow rise towards summer.

To those who love winter, the solstice marks the season’s first official day.

To those who love the light, it marks the slow but sure turn towards longer days of sunlight, a kind of symbolic rebirth of the sun. After the December solstice, daylight will gradually increase for the next six months as the Earth’s axis slowly tilts back, sending the sun higher and higher in the sky until it reaches the summit of summer.

There will be Winter Solstice parties and traditional bonfires. And I will toast with the rest but to me Winter Solstice also means something less worth celebrating. The burgeoning daylight means that there will be fewer hours to enjoy the darkness. Our nights will be getting shorter.

I may not say it out loud at those Solstice parties, but I am a lover of the night. There is a peace to it, and a quiet grace that the hours of full daylight can never match. And so, to me, the return of those sunlit hours does not come without a cost.

Some of that cost can be measured by simple math. Every place on earth averages about 12 hours of darkness a day over the course of a year but the pendulum of the light varies widely this far north. At the height of summer it will not grow “dark” until well after 10pm. The eastern horizon will glow with the first hint of the coming sun by shortly before 4 am giving us only 5-6 hours of true darkness to explore. The lingering sun closes us off from the landscape of the dark. We become blinded by the light.

What we miss is nothing short of magic. Is there anything glittering in those sunlit hours of summer to match the treasures of a winter’s dark sky? To bundle up on a dark winter’s night and find a place to lie on your back beneath the black velvet vault above is to almost literally enter another world. To watch the Milky Way arching across the sky, the constellations spelling out wonder, falling stars punctuating it all, is to understand the meaning of awe. To never know what that is like, to never see the constellations seemingly close enough to stir with your outstretched finger, to never feel the tug of excitement as a falling star zips across the horizon, to not know the weightlessness of the heart that comes over you beneath a sky gone wild with northern lights, is an impoverishment of the soul.

And in winter, the long hours of night are an invitation to such moments.

So come this Winter Solstice, let there be a cheer for the return of the light and a hopefulness for the season ahead. But in our anticipation of the light, let’s not forget the treasures of the dark. For there are those among us hidden in the light of the bonfires and behind the rising steam of the hot chocolate, who are still glad there is room in this world for both.

— Jeff Rennicke (all photos by the author unless otherwise noted)

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