Fast approaching one of favorite days of the year

We are approaching my second favorite day of the year, the day that makes me feel giddy in the morning and sees me to bed in the evening with newly reemerged feelings of hope and happiness. I am speaking, of course, of the winter solstice, where the sun ends its practical joke on the Northern Hemisphere and begins to return an equal share of radiation to those stranded on this side of the Equator.

Each day I watch the sun as it lopes over our neighbor’s shed, barely crests Pioneer Peak and disappears toward Anchorage with a speed that indicates it is not getting paid by the hour. It sinks lower and lower as the days slip by, and I worry that one morning it won’t bother at all, leaving Palmer in the perpetual gloom of dusk. But if the last 4.5 billion years are any indication, that will not happen and our old friend, that glowing orb, will rise in the sky on the morning of Dec. 22 a little bit higher than the previous day and we will be relieved in the understanding that while winter is just beginning, the seeds of its own destruction have already been sown.

This knowledge will be battered by the cold and wind and (hopefully) snow as we traverse winter, but our confidence will persist, as somewhere in the back of our mind we recall science teachers pounding into our heads the understanding that it is the tilt of the earth in its revolution around the sun that causes this anomaly we call seasons. This small, 23-degree tilt is what justifies studded tires and drives up utility bills.

Scientists hypothesize that the tilt was caused by a massive collision with a Mars-sized proto-planet more than 4 billion years ago. They think that this collision may not only account for the plethora of Subarus and Skhoops in Alaska, but may have also been responsible for the creation of the moon as well. Scientists have recently christened the proto-planet Theia, a clever name I think, as Theia was the Greek Titan who gave birth to the goddess of the moon. If I ever have children I will definitely recruit a team of scientists to name them.

It is fascinating to think of the cold and lack of light as a byproduct of a cosmic accident that could just as easily have tilted the earth to 5 degrees, or 90 degrees (imagine that one for a moment: summer would be all sun, all the time, winter the opposite — sort of like living in Fairbanks, I suppose).

Rarely does my mind strip away the layers of day-to-day reality that usually cloud my understanding of the natural world and allow me to see the seasons for what they really are. When I do have this clarity, it is usually on those beautifully clear, star-rich nights where the insignificance of who we are is written with a broad brush across the heavens.

Albert Einstein once noted: “The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity.”

The winter solstice inspires this curiosity in me. It reminds me of this marvelous structure of reality and produces feelings of awe and appreciation for the temporally distant collision that lead to this exquisite imperfection that has seasoned our world delightfully. That is why it is one of my favorites, and why I celebrate it dutifully each year by contemplating a little of this beautiful mystery. I invite you to do the same.

And my favorite day of the year? That is a remnant of yet another quirk, albeit a human one — that day in March when we move our clocks forward, granting us an extra hour of light in the evenings, which allows us to finally go outside and play after work.

Pete LaFrance grew up in Palmer and moved back to the area after 18 years living abroad.