Twenty-three degrees and twenty-seven minutes: that's the tilt angle the Earth leans off the perpendicular to the plane of orbit, which is why we're nearer to the sun in January than at any other time of the year. Solstice (which means "standing-still sun") goes back well over 4000 years, where Neolithic farmers marked the cycles of the moon and sun and threw great festivals and parties to herald its arrival. Ancient architecture has paid great homage to it (Stonehenge is well-known, but check out Scotland's Maeshowe, New Mexico's Sun Dagger, Ireland's Newgrange, and sun symbols from California's Chumash Indians); many early Catholic churches were built as solar observatories (tough to predict the date of Easter, otherwise); Hanukkah has the whole "sun/moon" thing goin' on, placed on the 25th of Kislev, three days before the new moon closest to the Winter Solstice ("rebirth of the sun"....."Festival of Lights".....coincidence?). Throughout the world, many folks (in Pakistan, China, Tibet, Iran, Russia, Germany, Spain, Scandinavia, etc.) are looking for a "seasonal universality", free of commercial theisms that bind and hinder; I, for one, can think of no better way of truly connecting than by acknowledging the ORIGINAL "reason for the season".
