Usefully Useless

Isn’t that some pagan thing those new-age folks make a bunch of noise about?

Well, no. It’s not. There are two meanings to it, one civil, one astronomical. I’ll do the astronomical one first. The summer solstice is simply when the sun reaches its highest in the sky, the tilt of Earth’s axis pointing directly to the sun. For this year, that time will be 05:45 UTC, June 21st. It’s the year’s longest day and, in places where the seasons aren’t lagged by seas or oceans, represents the height of summer. Of course here in Britain, the seasons are lagged by the Atlantic Ocean and we get the height of summer about a month later.

The sun will rise in the north east and set in the north west. Overnight it will never get truly dark, the northern horizon will glow as though the early stages of dawn constantly all night long because the sun just isn’t far enough below the horizon.

In civil use, it’s Fathers’ Day. It’s absolutely no coincidence that this is the longest day of the year! Fathers’ Day is held on the third Sunday in June, this being a much later Christian addition (early 20th century Unted States) which held that festivals could only be held on Sundays. This is merely the modern adaptation of the numerous summer solstice celebrations.

Not too coincidentally, Mothers’ Day, the third Sunday in some peculiar Christian festival called Lent, is almost on the Vernal Equinox and before the Christians ruined it, it was on the Vernal Equinox.

So if we start at the first equinox and run through the solstices, we have Mothers’ Day on the Vernal Equinox, Fathers’ Day on the Summer Solstice, various Harvest Festivals on the Autumnal Equinox and finally Christmas on the Winter Solstice.

Or you can just think of it as some pagan thing, that’s good too.