Winter Solstice

In case you missed it, yesterday was the Winter Solstice, the beginning of the end of the cold months. The significance of the Solstice as a meteorological milestone was really easy to miss -- unless you live in Denver, CO, in which case the Winter Solstice came upon you like a blizzard. The days will begin to get longer gradually and you won't see any major changes for a few weeks. So don't feel bad if you forgot to wear white or vandalize your car or whatever kids do these days to celebrate a holiday.

One person who didn't forget about Winter Solstice was Al Gore, the former Vice President and climate change advocate, who regularly celebrates his Major Winter Holiday four days before Christmas. Gore does this, not so much because the holiday season begins to wear on him and, like that one time when he had too many ice teas, he needs to go early, but rather because the Winter Solstice better represents his reason for winter-time celebration.

There is something really depressing about worshiping the earth. Why follow something that is in orbit around something else? Why not worship the person who made the earth? Maybe the earth worshipers -- or whatever the planetary adherents call themselves -- forgot about the Third Law of Thermodynamics or figured the rocks would eventually overcome entropy. Regardless, it's a little like worshiping yourself: poorly conceived.

So the Winter Solstice came and went and now the days are going to get longer. Big deal, right? Not if you live in Alaska. The frozen north is about the only location where marking your calendar around winter's peak makes sense and that only because it means you can stop rationing the alcoholic beverages.

In typical American fashion, businesses have found a way to turn the Winter Solstice into a shopping holiday. Signs saying "Solstice Sales" and several other sublime alliterations adorned the parking lots of major retail outlets, as stores tried to rope in the last desperate holiday shoppers. Yesterday stores were flaunting there wears more than usual in a last ditch attempt to sell more stuff before Christmas. Maybe they were just cold.

Ironically, very few of the sales centered around anything remotely related to winter (what do a coffee maker and weed eater have to do with the cold season?), but the stores hawked their goods unabashedly nonetheless. Some outlets even had posters depicting snowy 'scapes, hoisted ridiculously huge plastic snowflake replicas toward the ceilings or played Frank Sinatra's White Christmas softly over the PA system, even though it hasn't snowed in my hometown in nearly twenty years.

It wasn't even that cold yesterday. The weather certainly did not reflect the frigid temperature my Black Friday experience foretold. It was a little foggy though, which, around here, means Winter.

Despite the consumerism and fanfare, the Solstice was well received in my neck of the woods. By that I mean it was received by an uneventful tear of the December 21st page from our Dilbert Calendar Pad and a questioning look from my father accompanied by the question, "Today's the Solstice, right?"