Folklore, Meteors and Planets

The night sky is a tabloid of folklore; it was our first evening entertainment, after dinner, after grubs were clawed from the ground and eaten, after tubers were dusted off and munched on, after little furry things were skewered and roasted over our first fires. Huddled together in the darkness against the unseen and the unknown, we found succor and reassurance and entertainment in the night sky. The constellations stared down on us with benevolence. The planets skittered and swooped and loped along languidly. Stars fell unexpectedly, gifts from the gods, or harbingers of doom. The night sky was a tabloid with a wide circulation; everyone read it.

The end of autumn/beginning of winter edition of the night sky is always a bestseller. I mean, what night sky could offer us more in the way of folklore than this, the night sky of December? The sun has reached its nadir for the northern hemisphere, the nights are long and cold, the relentless decline of seasons has bottomed out and we begin that slow climb back into the light.

But that's a little deceiving, isn't it? It is the beginning of winter, the cold and snowy months. No longer than any other season, it only feels like it lasts forever. Yet in spite of that interminable dark and the cold, winter actually marks the return of the light, each day lasting a little longer than previous, each night a little shorter, the temperature eventually catching up.

Winter is a time to celebrate!

One such celebration was the ancient Roman festival Saturnalia. It was a fertility celebration, a gift of wax fruits symbolic of the increasing fruitfulness of nature as we approach. It was a solstice observation, celebrating the great wheel of the seasons as it now turns in a more favorable direction. It was a celebration commemorating the Golden Age of Saturn's rule.

Saturnalia was originally celebrated on the 19th. Eventually, after Caesar's reform of the calendar, and at the behest of Caligula, Saturnalia was celebrated from the 17th through the 23rd, and likely got its foot in the door for what would eventually be known as Christmas.

Those were the days.

These days we have an occultation of Jupiter by the moon near dawn on the 7th. Folks in the eastern U.S. and southern Canada will see it in its entirety; folks on the west coast will miss it completely, but will see a pretty nice near miss between the two once they do rise. In

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