Tag: winter solstice
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The Sealey Challenge: The Shortest Day
Today was a difficult day set in a difficult week, and I turned to picture book poetry for solace: Susan Cooper’s The Shortest Day, lovingly illustrated by Carson Ellis. Cooper has written of rising darkness forced down with light for years: I first met her, and fell in love with her work, with her Dark […]
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the shortest day, the longest night
Halloween has come and gone—snowy, this year, in Chicago, while Christmas promises to be warm—and now, we sit on the precipice of the solstice, this longest night and shortest day that marks the start of winter and the slow return of the light. The gods of the dark are vanquished, my ancestors would have said, […]
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a different kind of Advent calendar
Every year, ’round December, the holiday racket ratchets up. Every year, it feels like it’s a little louder, a little more aggressive. Every year—every single holiday, really—there are rushes of memes praising those who work holidays—and, every single holiday, those memes suggest a far more exclusive club than really exists. Christmas is coming, this year, […]
Essentially a Nerd 