Today is the day of the Winter Solstice. Four hours and three minutes from now, at 10:03 AM EST, the sun will be as far from Earth as it ever gets, and the sunlit portion of our days will start becoming longer. I believe that the first time the mention of Winter Solstice appeared on this website was in 2014, when I attended an event at Serpent Mound one day before departing on my Christmas Escape Run and included it in the journal for the trip.

It next appeared in 2019 in a blog post on the day following the Solstice. 2019 was the first year I attended the sunrise gathering at Fort Ancient. The image at right is of a poster I bought that day. It is from a painting by Mary Louise Holt depicting what a Solstice sunrise might have been like back when the Hopewell ran the place we call Fort Ancient.

This blog is published every week on Sunday. That 2014 Serpent Mound Solstice event was on a Sunday, but Solstice wasn’t even mentioned in the day’s blog post. Instead, the post described a quartet of museum visits I had made the preceding week. It is here.

Today is the first time the Winter Solstice has fallen on a Sunday since 2014. I obviously can’t actually report on it since it hasn’t happened yet, and I really don’t have any new thoughts on the event in general since that 2019 blog post: A Cosmic Reason for the Season. I have copied and reused that post twice (2020 and 2021) with new introductions added. This post’s opening image shows what things might have looked like 2000 years ago. The pictures at left show what things actually did look like six years ago.

I hope to post photos of a gathering today at a different mound in the journal of the trip just begun.