…you live West of the Rocky Mountains, dammit! I know I’m being an anal retentive stickler, but Solstice isn’t on Saturday if you live in California! Or Alaska! Or various other western states. It isn’t like Christmas where you just pick a random day of the year and it’s the same day every year. This year it happens on December 22 at 6:08 AM Universal time, which is at 10:08 PM on December 21 Pacific Standard Time. Why does this frustrate me so much? I don’t know. Perhaps a life needs to be gotten. I don’t know.
So happy Solstice…on Friday, west coast motherfu**ers!
The same thing happens with the full moon. The calendar indicates what DAY the full moon falls on, not the night. I get irritated when some “Wiccan” tells me “the full moon is tonight” and I have to explain, that no, the moon was full at 2 AM LAST NIGHT, and you missed it, (you retard.) If you’re going to pretend it’s important on some spiritual level, at least get it right.
This Mundane, Pointless rant brought to you by the letter Q. I’m going to try and locate a life now.
I stopped caring about the exact date of these things not long after I learned the correct pronunciations of athame and Samhain.
Intense magickal or alchemical workings? That’s a different story, and I’m anal about days and times and associations with that. But the Sabbats and Esbats are church, man. They’re parties, and times to hang out with like minded people for some playacting and a bit of fun.
But my gang is getting together Saturday night for our all-night Solstice vigil, if it helps you feel better. Of course, the actual solstice is no more Saturday night than it is Friday night - but who the heck wants to organize a Winter Solstice Breakfast?
Thank you. I’m weeping right now, in love and gratitude. Cheesy, I know, but I’ve never seen that scene, and it’s just perfect. This has been a really hard holiday season on me, and you’ve just reminded me why I bother.
I still don’t get it. So, technically, it’s an instant, but to the -observer-. It seems like it’d change due to the difference between a side real day and a solar day, and be different by up to fifteen minutes on the opposite side of the globe.
It’s just one time point for the entire globe. I understand it to mean the time when the earth is tilted furthest relative to the sun. It doesn’t matter where on earth you are standing at the time, except that if you’re in the northern hemisphere, it’s winter and if you’re in the southern hemisphere, it’s summer.
Put yourself as the observer at a fixed distance from the sun, between the sun and the earth. As the year progresses, the earth will seem to move closer and farther from you, and the northern hemisphere will tilt toward you and away from you. Solstice is the point at which one hemisphere of the earth reaches it’s maximum tilt away from you.
