Better to light one candle than to curse the darkness

So, we recently passed the Winter Solstice, the astronomical marker that prompts folks to announce "Yay, the days are getting longer again!" Technically true, but if the amount of daylight is your metric, you might want to cool your jets a little bit, since we're still in the bottom of the trough and will be for a while.

You see, there are other, mostly overlooked marker days between the equinoxes (when there's an equal amount of daylight and darkness) and the solstices (the longest day and shortest day of the year), and it is these days that really indicate when the daytimes are a changing. Those days happen to have old pagan holidays associated with them:

• Imbolc: February 1
• Beltane: May 1
• Lughnasdh: August 1
• Samhain: November 1

Why are these days important? Well, let's look at the conditions this year here in the City of Subdued Excitement, Bellingham Washington. On Samhain, we had 9.9 hours of daylight, over 2 hours less than that at the equinox and clearly in the go-to-work-and-get-home-in-the-dark zone. The length of the day continued to shorten until it was 8.25 hours at the solstice. Now the days are getting longer - hooray! But we won't get back to that Samhain length until pretty close to Imbolc - we'll still be beginning and ending our work days in the dark until then.

Here's a graphic representation:

This perspective, however mathematically true, can be a bit of a downer, but it does provide a more hopeful outlook in the summer. When folks moan on June 21 that the days are getting shorter, I remind them that the top of the curve lasts all the way till August 1 and there's no need to fret until then! (In fact, Coco notices without any prompting  a change in the sun every year at about Lughnasdh.)

One last odd factoid - except for Lughnasdh, we still have holidays on or near these mid-calendar days: Groundhog Day, May Day, and Halloween.

So, celebrate the solstice with all great gusto if you will, but keep those candles handy.

Disclaimer: I used the 1st and 21st of the month as a quick shorthand;  the solar calendar actually wobbles a bit, so the markers in a given year may be a few days off in either direction.