Toward a shorter winter

Toward a shorter winter

Scripps Howard News Service: Sunday at 7:04 a.m. .ET — don’t bother to get up, there’s not much to see — we will have reached the winter solstice, the shortest day and longest night of the year and by one measure the official start of winter.

The sun is directly over the Tropic of Capricorn in the southern hemisphere and at its lowest point in the sky in the northern hemisphere where it will seem to linger for several days until people in the far north wonder if it will ever get light again.

Slowly the sun will begin its climb back north (astronomers hate it when you talk as if Copernicus and Galileo never existed) and almost imperceptibly the days will start getting longer and the nights shorter until next March 20, the vernal equinox and, again by one measure, the official start of spring. That’s a long, dark, cold slog.

But there’s another way — some would say a mildly delusional way — of looking at it and that’s to date winter the way the National Weather Service does, from Dec. 1 to Feb. 28, which in fact is how most people think of winter.

Come Dec. 21 the National Weather Service winter is almost one-fourth gone, well, 23 percent, to be exact. Instead of 89 days of winter, we’re facing only 69. Feel better? Well, we tried. Enjoy the solstice anyway.