It's December, that means the Winter Solstice, which occurs at 18:36 U.T. on the 21st. It is the shortest day of the year; the earliest sunset, however, occurs on the 7th, at 4:35 pm local time or thereabout, depending on your north latitude. (The latest sunrise occurs in about a month, on the 5th of January. Perihelion - when we are nearest the Sun - occurs on January 2nd.)
It's December. That means the Geminid meteor shower. You can sleep in this year; the peak falls during the Full Moon. The much smaller Ursid meteor shower peaks on the 22nd. With its radiant in the north circumpolar sky, it is up there all night. The waning gibbous moon, however, rises near midnight local time, so there's little opportunity for dark-sky meteor observing.
It's December, when we celebrate a host of new-fangled quasi-, semi-, and commercially religious holidays, all spin-offs of Solstice Celebrations, which come to us from a time when we paid attention to the stars and revered them with our well-intentioned faith. I wish we all still celebrated the seasonal changes; nature deserves that.
It's December, and this year's Christmas Star is Venus, shining in the dusk like a hole in the sky at a sunglasses-please magnitude -4.7. It doesn't get any brighter than this. I think it might require sunscreen, it's so hotly bright. It's only about 22 degrees above the horizon, though, losing altitude by the end of the month.
It's December; Jupiter and Mercury are the month's morning planets. The gas giant is about 30 degrees high by the twilight of dawn, closing in on Alpha Librae (Zubenelgenubi), while the little bit of fleet-footed rock, at a bright magnitude -0.4, rises nearly 2 hours before the Sun on the 10th. This is about as far ahead of the Sun as it can rise.
It's December. Mars shines brightly in Aries; Saturn shines brightly in Cancer, near the Beehive cluster. The Moon is New on the 1st, and again and the 31st. The constellations drift by. The universe expands. Another year ends...
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