The winter solstice in the northern hemisphere is the shortest day, the longest night, of the year. It is a day that is also commonly called "midwinter." But it is curious that, instead of marking this day as the midpoint of winter, we say that it marks the beginning of winter.
To me it marks the one-third point of winter, for I always feel that winter begins on December first. Where does that notion come from, I wonder??
I made the card above years ago for a friend who was having a "Winter Solstice Party" and wanted a card for his invitations. This card was made by copying a photo of the night sky and using three different sizes of lift-off stars to mark the positions of all the stars. Then I made a frame and wrote the title "The Northern Sky on a Winter Night." All of this was done with black stars and black ink, so I had a reverse negative photograph made which turned everything black into white. Then I printed the card in royal blue ink and got the image above.
The only constellation I am any good at finding by myself is the Big Dipper, and if you look closely, you will find it in the middle. Uh-oh! Now that I look at it myself, I see that the stars in the dipper of the Big Dipper are not positioned correctly. Hmmmmm. You are supposed to be able to find the North Star by using the stars in the Big Dipper, and I think I have made that impossible to do.
My northern sky contains a false clue, leading wayfarers in the wrong direction!
This 1860 painting by Régis François Gignoux is titled "Mid-Winter Moonlight." A perfect title for the day of the winter solstice! I wonder if he was thinking of that when he painted this folkloric scene, children skating on a frozen pond in the middle of a frozen world, the air itself so cold it is cloudy, the way warm breath clouds on a winter day. But the "moonlight" seems more like some kind of surreal midnight sunlight, doesn't it?
I especially like the girl or woman just at the edge of the bridge. Like the frozen waterfall, she, too, seems to be captured in a moment of absolute stillness, neither stepping forward nor turning backward. She is in a state of eternal contemplation. I find that I tend to be very contemplative in this time of year myself. And I seem to be looking inside my heart and soul more than usual this year.
Gignoux was a French painter who lived in the United States from 1840 to 1870, so this is probably a scene from a little town on our eastern coast, somewhere in New York or New Jersey, perhaps.
Here is a glimpse of real mid-winter, a deeper snow, a more inclement landscape. This painting is by Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) and is titled "Poor Woman of the Village." It is a reminder to me that mid-winter comes with danger, and that those of us who are the most poor are most at risk in deep winter. The mother carries a load of kindling that is as large as herself, and she is bent beneath its weight.
I love the thought that when this mother and her child and her high-stepping goat get to their destination, they will be warmed by this load of kindling, if only for a little bit. And I love their shoes, which look like wooden Dutch shoes turned up in a peak at the toes.
We do not experience this kind of winter where I live. For the most part, our winter is really the cold of the tail end of autumn.
Wherever you are, I hope you are warm on this winter solstice. I hope you have enough kindling to keep you cozy, and a fireplace or an electric heater, a gas stove, a campfire. I hope you have a little space in your life where you can come to a full stop and contemplate the universe.
And I hope you will find the North Star in spite of would-be artists like myself who sometimes scatter stars about in a very willy-nilly fashion!
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