![]() ![]() ![]() They burned beseeching fires all night long. Just look at the way the curtain of dark is looming over the small people in the cover illustration (farther above). In the illustrations you can almost feel the weight of the dark that the sun is trying to push away. Caldecott-winning illustrator Carson Ellis depicts Sun as a giant stone man-figure, bent with age, stooping lower each day, until he can barely hold his head up above the horizon, and indeed he seems to collapse on that shortest day. ![]() ![]() So the shortest day came, and the year died. This fall her poem was released in the form of a picture book, The Shortest Day, an evocative look at midwinter. Imagine especially how it must have felt for those living in far northern latitudes, when the sun might disappear entirely! Is it any wonder, then, that rituals associated with the winter solstice (December 21 this year) have been observed since ancient times?īack in 1974, eminent author Susan Cooper was asked to write a poem about the winter solstice for the now-famous Cambridge Christmas Revels, and her poem has been a part of the annual Revels ever since. If we feel this way in these modern, enlightened times, imagine how it must have felt millenia ago, when the sun seemed to struggle more and more to rise, and faltered more quickly towards the horizon, with each passing day. As we drive to work in the dark, and drive home in the dark, we begin to wonder, will we ever see the sun again? ![]()
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