Solstice marks beginning of winter

On the shortest day, the winter solstice, you cast the longest shadows.

In the Northern Hemisphere, it’s the astronomical start of winter, which sounds like tough sledding, or nice sledding if you’re a musher. In the southern hemisphere — where it’s the longest day — it’s the beachiest.

But it’s also the beginning of the great shift. More light! More light! And the world takes note.

Jenny Dickson, the director of the wildlife division of the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection said she starts noticing it just about the arrival of the new year.

“The light starts changing,” she said. “And we feel better.”

The solstice this year is on Tuesday, Dec. 21. If you’re Druidically inclined, you put a lit match to a bonfire and chant.

But Geoff Chester, spokesman for the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington DC, said the moment of true solstice will occur at at 10:59 a.m. Tuesday.

That’s when the sun arrives at the Tropic of Capricorn — the line of latitude that sits 23 degrees 26 minutes south of the equator.

Because of the slant of the earth’s axis, the sun’s warmth waxes and wanes in different parts of the globe at different times of the year. At the winter solstice, it reaches the point where it goes no further south. After that, the earth’s orbit and axis means more sunlight north of the equator, less south of it.

This shifting of light is the great driver of the natural world. Birds get the urge for going because of it. Plants go dormant, then awaken because of it. Turtles head for pond bottoms, salamanders for leaf litter, because of the change in light.

“Even some aquatic life, which doesn’t seem to have vision, senses it,” said Patrick Comins, executive director of the Connecticut Audubon Society

“We are still hard-wired for it, whether it’s our feathered, furred or scaled friends,” Dickson said.

Dickson said the short days are, naturally, matched by cold temperatures.

It’s that combination that drives some animals to hibernate, others to work harder to stay alive.

“Squirrels are out trying to find every nut they can,”

she said. “Birds seem to be making non-stop flights back and forth to feeders.”

That’s because they know that the days are shorter and they have to hunker down earlier when darkness arrives, Dickson said. So they concentrate on finding food in the limited daylight hours they have.

That hard-wiring includes humans. We can suffer from seasonal affecConnecticut tive disorder — lethargy and depression brought on by lack of sunlight.

Which is why we are driven to scurry around as well, using the bustle of winter holidays to get us into the New Year, when the sun will start coming back. We decorate trees and gather together to carol and share food and drink. We’re like squirrels, wrapped in scarves, seeking eggnog instead of acorns.

Only, if we pause and breathe in the cold air, we can see a different world. Because the sun is low in the sky and the trees are bare, it’s a world cross-hatched with shadows. (on the 21st, the solstice, the sun is lowest, and shadows, longest. Tap dance in the sun and watch your slanting friend follow.)

Dickson said you can walk in the woods and see the shelled nuts of squirrels at work. You can sometimes find the oval of matted leaves in a thicket, where deer bedded down the night before

Cathy Hagadorn, executive director of the Deer Pond Farm Nature Center in Sherman, owned by the Audubon Society, said that summer is all primary colors — green leaves, blue sky, yellow sun.

“Winter is more pastels,’’ she said. “The shadows are extraordinary. Sunsets here are unlike any other time of the year.”

If there are ice crystals in the air, you can see halos and sundogs in the winter sky.

If there are ice crystals on the tree branches or bare rocks, they shine, the DEEP’s Dickson said. Add to that, snow. “Snow frames things — the width of oak trees, the length of stone walls,” Hagadorn said. “You can get out your cell phone and take pictures of individual snowflakes and appreciate them.”

And there is this. The light is changing. As the days get longer, the world will change as well. Until…

“There’s the night in spring when you go outside,” said Comins of the Audubon Society. “It’s not cold. You walk and it’s magic.”

Christian Abraham / Hearst Connecticut Media file photo The winter solstice celebration of the longest night was held at the historic John Downs House in Milford on Dec. 21, 2018. In addition to a tour of the historic home’s first floor, cauldrons were lit to provide warmth and light. Chestnuts were provided to toss into the fire, symbolizing cleansing negativity from the previous year.