46 Fun Facts About Winter Solstice

The winter solstice is the day with what?

The shortest daylight does not bring the coldest weather: land and sea keep losing heat for weeks, so the deepest cold usually arrives about a month later.

In the Northern Hemisphere, the winter solstice falls on or about which date?

December 21 or 22: the Northern Hemisphere's winter solstice almost always falls on one of those dates, drifting slightly year to year as leap years catch the calendar up with Earth's orbit.

At a hemisphere's winter solstice, its pole reaches its maximum tilt in which direction?

Away from the Sun: with its pole leaning back, that hemisphere sees the noon Sun climb less high than on any other day, so midday shadows are the longest of the year.

Which Nordic capital gets only about four hours of daylight a day in midwinter?

Reykjavik lies at 64 degrees north, well beyond the other three, so in midwinter its Sun rises after 11 am and is gone by about 3:30 pm.

Earth's axis is tilted by roughly how many degrees?

23.4 degrees is Earth's current obliquity, and that lean alone, not distance from the Sun, is what makes winter and summer.

Earth is actually closest to the Sun in which month?

January: Earth reaches perihelion, its closest point to the Sun, in the first week of the month, so distance cannot be what makes the Northern Hemisphere's winter.

On midsummer morning at Stonehenge, the Sun rises behind which landmark of the monument?

The Heel Stone stands outside the circle, so the midsummer Sun rising behind it sends its first rays into the heart of Stonehenge; the midwinter sunset lies on the same line, the opposite way.

The Newgrange passage tomb in Ireland is older than Stonehenge and older than what else?

The Egyptian pyramids: Newgrange went up more than 5,000 years ago, centuries before Giza; its doorway lay hidden until labourers digging the mound for stone uncovered it in 1699.

At Newgrange, the winter solstice sunrise shines into the inner chamber through what feature?

A roofbox above the entrance lets the sunrise beam travel 19 metres up the passage to the chamber; so many people want to be inside for it that places are drawn by lottery each year.

Which Germanic midwinter festival was later merged with Christmas?

Yule kept its name after conversion: a saga says Norway's King Haakon the Good made a law moving the feast to the Christian date, and Yule lives on as another word for Christmas.

Which Roman midwinter festival began on 17 December with feasting and gift-giving?

Saturnalia turned Roman order upside down for a few days: work stopped, gambling was allowed, and a mock king was chosen whose silly orders the party had to obey.

At the Chinese winter festival, families make and eat balls of glutinous rice called what?

Tangyuan sounds like tuanyuan, the Chinese word for reunion, so sharing a bowl of the round rice balls is a way of saying the family is whole.

Midwinter Day, kept with a feast and an exchange of gifts, is a tradition of crews wintering where?

Antarctica: the tradition is credited to Robert Falcon Scott's 1902 expedition, whose men marked midwinter with paper decorations, plum puddings, mince pies and presents.

Which two red fruits are especially significant at Yalda Night?

Pomegranates and watermelons head the Yalda table beside nuts and sweets; their red is said to stand for the glow of dawn and the warmth of life.

The Soyal solstice ceremony, which opens the kachina season, belongs to which Native American people?

The Hopi open their underground kivas at Soyal to welcome the kachinas, spirit beings who stay with the villages until the Niman ceremony in July, then go home to the San Francisco Peaks.

The Inca sun festival Inti Raymi was centred on which city?

Cusco, the Inca capital, held Inti Raymi in its main square until Spanish authorities banned it in the 1500s; since 1944 actors have restaged it at Sacsayhuaman above the city.

Which Japanese sun goddess hid in a cave, plunging the world into darkness?

Amaterasu: in the Kojiki the sun goddess shut herself in the Heavenly Rock Cave after her brother Susanoo's rampage, and the gods lured her out with a mirror and dancing, restoring light.

In the Southern Hemisphere, the winter solstice falls in which month?

June: the seasons flip south of the equator, so midwinter there comes around June 21, and the Inca timed their great sun festival to it.

In Sweden, which saint is honoured with candle-crowned processions on 13 December?

Saint Lucia: Swedish Luciadagen on 13 December features a girl in a white gown and a crown of candles; under the old Julian calendar the date fell within days of the winter solstice.

Which Norse god, known by scores of names, was also called Jolnir after the midwinter feast?

Odin: Jolnir comes from the Norse word for the midwinter feast, and poets used the same root for the gods as a group, a sign of how closely the feast was tied to them.

At the northern winter solstice, which place is midway through six months of unbroken daylight?

The South Pole sees one sunrise a year, in September, and one sunset in March, so the northern midwinter finds it in round-the-clock daylight.

In the far north or south, what is it called when the Sun stays below the horizon for more than 24 hours?

Polar night grows longer the nearer you get to a pole: about a day at its outer edge, some six months at the pole itself, where the Sun sets just once a year.

The midnight sun, when the Sun never sets, happens north of which line?

The Arctic Circle marks where the Sun can stay up for a full day; the line is not fixed, creeping north by about 15 metres a year as Earth's tilt slowly eases.

The Roman writer Macrobius said Egyptians showed the winter-solstice Sun in which form?

As an infant: Macrobius wrote that the Sun looks tiny at midwinter, so its image was a baby brought out of a shrine; by midsummer, at full strength, it was shown as a bearded man.

Which Mississippian site in Illinois had a 'Woodhenge' of posts aligned to the solstice sunrises?

Cahokia's Woodhenge was found by accident in the early 1960s: digging ahead of a planned highway, Warren Wittry noticed big post pits lying in arcs and guessed they were a sun calendar.

'Yalda', a Syriac word that Christians also used for Christmas, means what?

Birth: 'Yalda' is Syriac for birth and was the Syriac Christians' name for Christmas; their Persian-speaking neighbours borrowed the word for their own midwinter night.

Newgrange overlooks which Irish river, also the site of a famous 1690 battle?

The Boyne loops past Newgrange and probably carried its building stone: the great slabs are thought to have come by sea and then upriver before being hauled up to the ridge.

Which Persian poet's verse is traditionally read aloud on Yalda Night?

Hafez: on Yalda Night families open the Divan of Hafez at random and read the ghazal on that page as a fortune, a custom called fal-e Hafez.

Which cycles link slow changes in Earth's tilt and orbit to the timing of ice ages?

Milankovitch cycles: Milutin Milankovitch worked out the theory in the 1920s, and in 1976 deep-sea sediment cores showed the ice ages had kept time with the orbital cycles he calculated.

Stonehenge stands on which chalk upland in Wiltshire?

Salisbury Plain was not where the giant stones came from: analysis published in 2020 traced most of Stonehenge's sarsens to West Woods, about 16 miles to the north.

Which planet lies tipped on its side, so each pole spends decades in darkness?

Uranus spins at nearly 90 degrees to its orbit, perhaps after an ancient collision, so over its 84-year trip round the Sun each pole gets one very long day and one very long night.

After the winter solstice, what happens to the length of the days?

They start getting longer straight away, yet mornings stay dark: clock time and Sun time drift apart at this time of year, so the latest sunrise comes a little after the solstice.

Stonehenge's smaller bluestones came from hills some 150 miles away in which country?

Wales: the bluestones match rock outcrops in the Preseli Hills of Pembrokeshire, yet a medieval legend had the wizard Merlin bring the whole monument over from Ireland.

What are the two days a year called when day and night nearly match in length?

The equinoxes fall in March and September; even then daylight wins by several minutes, because the atmosphere bends the Sun's rays and lifts it into view before it has truly risen.

With no tilt at all, how would a planet's spin axis sit relative to the plane of its orbit?

Perpendicular: an upright axis would give each latitude the same sunlight all year, so the planet would have no seasons, close to the case on Jupiter, which leans only about 3 degrees.

For a Northern Hemisphere observer, the winter solstice Sun rises in which direction?

South-east: the midwinter Sun rises at its most southerly point on the horizon, which is why Newgrange's passage points that way; by midsummer the sunrise has swung round to the north-east.

In northern China, which winter-solstice food is said to protect the ears from frostbite?

Dumplings: legend credits the Han-dynasty physician Zhang Zhongjing, who wrapped mutton and warming herbs in dough for the frostbitten poor and shaped the parcels like the ears he hoped to save.

Which temple complex at Luxor has its main axis aligned to the midwinter sunrise?

Karnak was laid out so that the solstice sunrise shines along its axis toward the shrine of the sun god Amun-Ra, and crowds gather there each year to watch it.

The word 'solstice' comes from Latin roots meaning what?

Sun stands still: Latin sol plus sistere, 'to make stand', because the Sun's rising point creeps along the horizon, seems to halt for a few days, then reverses.

To ward off winter colds, Japanese custom calls for a solstice bath infused with which fruit?

Yuzu fruits are floated whole in the hot tub, sometimes tied in a cloth bag, so the water draws out their scent; the bath is known as yuzuyu.

In the ancient Roman calendar, which date was counted as the winter solstice?

December 25 was the solstice in the old Julian calendar; the calendar later drifted and was reformed, moving the solstice a few days earlier, but Christmas stayed on the old date.

The Neolithic Goseck Circle, with openings for the solstice sunrise and sunset, is in which country?

Germany's Goseck Circle was spotted from the air in 1991 as rings under a wheat field; rebuilt with wooden palisades, it reopened on the winter solstice of 2005.

The Hindu festival Makara Sankranti marks the Sun's entry into which zodiac sign, also the name of a tropic?

Capricorn is Makara in Sanskrit; the festival honours the sun god Surya, and in Gujarat, where it is called Uttarayan, the sky fills with thousands of kites.

Maeshowe, a passage grave lit by the setting midwinter sun, stands on which Scottish islands?

Orkney's Maeshowe lay sealed for some 3,000 years until Norsemen broke in and carved runic graffiti across its walls.

Bede wrote that pagan Anglo-Saxons began their year on a night called Modranecht, which means what?

Mothers' Night: Bede, a Christian monk, could only guess the name came from ceremonies held through the night; scholars link it to mother goddesses honoured on Roman-era altars.

Rome's midwinter festival famously relaxed the rules for which group, who could feast, gamble and speak freely?

Slaves were given a banquet, could gamble and could speak their minds without punishment; accounts differ on whether their masters really waited on them at table.