Stell Moon becomes full on Tuesday

BillFelker POOR WILL’S ALMANACK

December26 ,2020to January 1,2021

Now I have told the year from dawn to dusk,

Its morning and its evening and its noon;

Once round the sun our slanting orbit rolled,

Four times the season changed, thirteen the moon….

Vita Sackville-West

Astronomical data and lore

The waxing Stell Moon swells through its second quarter this week, becoming completely full on December 29 at 10:29 p.m. Rising late in the day and setting in the morning, this moon passes overhead in the middle of the night, encouraging activity in creatures at that time, especially as the December 30 cold front approaches.

The Pleiades and Taurus will be almost directly overhead around eleven at night, and Orion will be fully visible behind them. In the far east, Regulus, the brightest star of spring, will be just starting to rise along the tree line.

Weather trends

Christmas is typically the brightest day of the week, bringing a 70 percent chance for sun. The 28th is the darkest day of December’s fourth week, with a 70 percent chance for clouds. Snow falls half the time on Christmas Eve and on the two days before New Year’s Day. The 26th is typically the coldest day of the week and has a 40 percent chance for highs just in the teens or 20s. Expect the full moon on December 29 to increase the likelihood of bad weather for New Year’s

Eve and for a brisk beginning to 2021.

Average high temperatures fluctuate only about two to three degrees between December 21 and the approach of early spring in the third week of February. The cold is created by approximately 37 cold fronts passing through the region between the third week of October and the third week of April. By today, seventeen of those fronts have normally arrived, almost half the season.

Notes on the progress of the year

Milder weather may open pussy willows and draw up snowdrops, crocus and aconites as the days expand, but along the Gulf of Mexico, the Season of the Rising Sun is already shortening the dormancy of trees and shrubs, hurrying the gestation of spring. Across coastal Georgia, sweet gums and yellow poplars finally lose their leaves, and their buds swell almost immediately to replace the loss. In central Florida, red maples open, and Jessamine produces its yellow blossoms.

In the Lower Midwest, the Season of Dormancy can last from November through March, but a little more than a thousand miles south, that period narrows to a slender, ambivalent space, a borderland in which the difference between winter and spring balances on a fulcrum as small as a single plant or a single hour.

The earliest of the permanent resident birds, the tufted titmice, begin mating calls as December becomes January. Although the coldest weeks of winter keep the progress of spring confined to movement of the sun and the stars, the titmouse stakes out his territory, setting precedent for the cardinals and doves, which join him at the end of the year’s first month

In the field and garden

Calculate livestock feed acreage required for the year ahead. As you sort receipts and records for taxes, plan to make improvements in 2021. Rheumatism in livestock increases during the cold and damp weather of winter. A tablespoonful of paprika and one of molasses per day are considered helpful to reduce the stiffness in animals’ joints. Try it for your own aches and pains!

Pullets (hens) which will produce summer eggs are hatching. Plan now to have broilers ready for market as early in the year as possible. The outside garden is almost always gone by now. Collards and kale, and well mulched carrots and beets can survive to this point in season, but January’s cold spells eventually take them. Indoors, however, tomato and pepper plants, seeded in middle summer and brought inside before frost, should be continuing to produce fruit in a south window. Basil, parsley, rosemary, thyme and oregano can also be doing well indoors.

Journal

I have been rereading essays by theologians Thomas Merton and St. Bernard. Both of them obsessively extracted novel and often useful meanings from the events of the Christian liturgical year. St. Bernard was especially gifted of at enumerating things such as the three aspects of Advent or the twelve rungs on the ladder of humility. In his lists, he explored many unlikely dimensions of a topic, often reaching well beyond the expected to achieve his desired number of insights. As I walked in the woods today, I wondered what Bernard would do with all these green Scriptures. He was a man who made tiers of everything, filled in the empty spaces of events, created sequences out of concepts, found allegory wherever he looked. I imagined him building the green ladder of this day, finding four transcendent stages in DeepWinter, six hidden levels in the thickness of mosses, nine miraculous shades of December jade.

“PoorWill’sAlmanackfor 2021” containsdetailed descriptionsof all48seasons oftheyear. Orderfrom Amazonorpurchasean autographedcopybysending acheckfor$20toPoorWill, Box431,YellowSprings, Ohio 45387.