The photo at right was taken at the very beginning of the longest night of 2024. It was supposed to show the sun setting over the Ohio River but the sun is doing its thing behind a wall of clouds. Winter Solstice is about sixteen hours away. Sunrise is fourteen hours and nineteen minutes away.

In four of the last five Decembers, I have published a solstice-related post. Three were versions of A Cosmic Reason for the Season which was first published in 2019. It basically tries to explain how modern-day Christmas had its beginning in celebrations of the Winter Solstice and how the two have become quite disconnected over the centuries. Last year’s Don’t Christmas My Yule post came from my realization that not everyone considers Yule to be synonymous with Christmas and that many celebrate a Yule that is just as tightly tied to the solstice as it ever was.

Those posts, along with a few others, talk about how holidays like Christmas, Easter, and Groundhog Day (Candlemas) have become so out of synch with nature that most see no connection at all. If that sort of thing interests you, I suggest reading them and I doubly suggest reading an article I’ve cited in them: The Winter Solstice and the Origins of Christmas 

This article is being published during the gap between Solstice and Christmas and looks at a question I’ve had about the latter for some time. I guess the question had never bothered me enough to look for an answer because, when I did, I immediately found an article that used the question I was asking as its title and answered it quite nicely. The question — and article — is: Why is Christmas a Federal Holiday?

As I said, the article answers the question quite nicely and I won’t repeat it all here. The extremely short version is that it was declared a holiday by date rather than by name and that seems to be the primary reason it has survived First Amendment-based challenges. Some weight has also been given to the fact that three other clearly secular holidays were established at the same time. The pertinent text of the 1870 bill is: “The first day of January, commonly called New Year’s Day, the fourth day of July, the twenty-fifth day of December, commonly called Christmas, and any day appointed or recommended by the President of the United States as a day of public fast or thanksgiving shall be holidays…” The full bill is here.

Note that the bill tied three of the holidays to days of the month with no mention of days of the week and no consideration for solar or lunar positions. Thanksgiving was not tied to anything at all. It had been celebrated since the days of George Washington but its date was set by proclamation and varied considerably. Lincoln moved to tie it to the last Thursday of November with an 1863 proclamation but for some reason, the 1870 bill did not put that into law. Nonetheless, Lincoln’s proclamation held until Franklin Roosevelt tried moving the holiday to lengthen the 1939 “25th of December” shopping season. Not everyone went along and in 1941 the legislature finally stepped in to nail Thanksgiving to the fourth Thursday of November. 

I felt somewhat chagrined when I read that 1870 holiday bill. For several years I have made a conscious effort to refer to that big mid-summer holiday as Independence Day instead of the — I thought — more informal 4th of July. I stand corrected and henceforth will try to remember to wish everyone a Happy 4th of July and a Merry 25th of December.