Happy Winter Solstice 2018

Longer spans of sunlight our in our immediate future, as today marks the shortest daylight day of the year. Tonight's longest night will be brightened by a full moon. Winter officially arrives at 4:21 pm CST. So celebrate the arrival of our shortest day since that means longer stretches of daylight start tomorrow. The increase does start slowly, only one additional second tomorrow, but that will accelerate going forward.

We were rewarded with clear skies and a bright sunrise to greet today's Winter Solstice as you can see in this picture I took this morning. Please note, I DID NOT look through a camera lens to get the shot. I aimed my ipad in the general direction of the sunrise. I did have to take several photos since I could not frame the shot directly. And yes, I did some photographic art manipulation to the image to help capture the glorious way this sunrise on this shortest day of the year made me feel. Cheers to sunshine.

Fabulous First Day of Winter

So you might be asking, "How do 'fabulous' and 'first day of winter' go together?" They might go together for you if you are into winter sports or love the cold weather, but neither of those reasons is why I say that the first day of winter is fabulous. The first day of winter, the winter solstice, December 22, 2011, marks the shortest daytime and longest nighttime in the northern hemisphere this year. The daylight portion of each day starts getting longer from here. That is fabulous in my book! So if no one else has wished you a wonderful winter solstice, let me be the first. I wish you a fabulous first day of winter and a wonderful winter solstice.

As we round out the year, there are other, more celebrated days and I wish you Happy Holidays for your remaining 2011 celebrations as well as an early Happy New Year for 2012. And since today has the shortest daytime of the year, you will get to enjoy all of them with a little more daylight. Yippee!!