Rejoice the Return of the Sun

We have made it through again!  No more sleeps, the days are getting longer.  The happiest day of the year. :-)  Hope you enjoy your own celebrations this season and I will see you in the new year.  As you know from my summer vacation, when I am on vacation, I am oooonnnn vacation. 

9 sleeps

Theoretically I did not walk from the Law Library to the Main Library in my sandals, it is winter after all and in reality, not theoretically, it must be two feet of snow and minus twenty C.  But I enjoyed my theoretical walk.  It was to the Christmas potluck.  I baked a bread sun to celebrate the upcoming First Longer Day...nine sleeps.

Just got the phone call. The sun won second prize in the yummy eats contest.

15 sleeps

I stand in the crabapple grove, with five magpies arrayed on the branches with the brown apples, all of us enjoying the sunshine of a short afternoon.  I think, two weeks, fifteen sleeps. And when I wake up on the fifteenth day it will the First Longer Day.  The best day of the year for me, perhaps, when viewed that way, the most sacred day of the year.  It is the day that fall, our long fall into darkness, is over, the sun stops and turns, and returns.  Winter begins.  The Light grows, as though in a mother's belly, until in early February, even the sleepiest of us awakens to awareness that the days are getting longer.