As we roll through the third week of December, the days are getting shorter and it seems like the gloaming starts by 3 or 4 o’clock.

Today, thankfully, is the first full day of winter, what with the solstice occurring at 3:47 p.m. yesterday. It’s when we crossed over the hump so to speak, the shortest daylight day of the year, and I’m talking less than 10 hours. The important thing is that the hours of daylight will start getting longer and – look out – we’re on our way to spring, and the five seasons start all over again: spring, summer, fall, winter and Christmas.

Any way you look at it, it’s a pivotal day. The thing is, a couple of days before and after the solstice, the sun’s movement is so slight that it appears to stop. In pre-enlightened times it was thought that the sun was standing still, so they came up with the Latin word for “sun” and “to stand still,” or solstice.

Here’s where it gets technical, so bear with me.

Keeping in mind the Earth’s 23.5-degree tilt, as we go from summer to winter in the Northern Hemisphere, the points on the horizon where the sun rises and sets moves a tiny bit northward each day. The high point of the sun also moves northward each day.

This raises the question; why 23.5 degrees? Why any degrees at all? I’m wondering if one day way back in history something like a ginormous comet or asteroid whacked the planet out from a straight up and down spin. Inquiring minds want to know.

And while we’re inquiring…in Australia does Santa Claus wear that heavy winter outfit, or does he switch at the equator to a red tank top with white piping? I mean, it is the summer solstice down under. I guess he does one hemisphere and then the other really, really fast like Superman in a phone booth. And he covers the entire Earth in one night.

Now we’re getting deep into quantum mechanics here. I wonder if Santa would agree to take a ride through the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland to test a couple of theories. I’ve often wondered if Santa Claus is the elusive Higgs boson after all.

Well, at this point it’s clear that I’d better get with the physics students at New Mexico Tech before I shoot my mouth off any more on this Santa thing.

Speaking of Tech, the mass exodus of students are going home for the Christmas break, and Socorro school kids are also getting off. Likewise, for Magdalena.

But life goes on ,and the rest of us will still be working Thinking about that makes me miss those days when I was going to school and getting all those days off. Ah… summer vacation… lazy days, ice cream cones and playing outside till dark.

Oops. It appears I’m drifting off-topic here.

In the meantime, like I’ve said before, feel free to indulge in the spirit of the season. Sing some carols, munch on holiday treats, and dream of a white Xmas.

Speaking of which, I don’t know about you, but some of us have mixed feelings about writing “Xmas” instead of spelling out the word Christmas. Using the X in Xmas is not a new thing dreamed up by advertising agencies, at least that’s what I learned in my First Century Christianity class back at college. It all started in the mid-0000s when the Roman government was persecuting anybody and everybody that didn’t worship one, or all, of their various and sundry deities. That meant the early Christian groups had to be secretive in passing along their good news. So, to let others know who they were talking to they would just draw out an X in the dirt, like a code. X is the first letter in the Greek word Christ, so the X does have some history. Kind of like a 1st-century hashtag.

While we’re on the subject, historians and theologians pretty much agree that Mary did not actually have Jesus on December 25. They figure in the early years of the church it was decided to celebrate the birth of Christ around the above-mentioned winter solstice since that date was already a holiday celebrated by who knows how many others of varying beliefs.

You had your Saturnalia and Mithras already in place around that date, and farther north you had your Druids with their evergreen trees and their Yuletide.

Oh, and the often-sung song about Yule logs, which is sort of like keeping the home fires burning over winter, I guess.

I wonder if piñon can qualify as a yule log.

John Larson, El Defensor Chieftain