Tag: solstice

Reading

Gathering of Poetry | December 2024

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blue sky with an elliptic figure-8 in the background with standing stones in the foreground

Mid-December and we have only a light dusting of snow, nothing like the hip-high drifts of my childhood. For this third Thursday Gathering of Poetry, I will celebrate a winter trio: snow (not yet fallen), winter solstice, and Nikki Giovanni’s Winter Poem.

once a snowflake fell
on my brow and i loved
it so much and i kissed
it and it was happy and called its cousins
and brothers and a web
of snow engulfed me then
i reached to love them all
and i squeezed them and they became
a spring rain and i stood perfectly
still and was a flower

Bibliographic credit: Giovanni, Nikki. The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni: 1968-1998. © Harper Perennial, 2007.

Photo and graphic credit: Analemma over the Callanish Stones, © Giuseppe Petricca.

NASA technical description: An analemma is a composite image taken from the same spot at the same time over the course of a year. The tilt of the Earth axis and the ellipticity of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun create the analemma’s figure-8 shape. At the solstices, the Sun will appear at the top or bottom of an analemma. The featured image was taken near the December solstice 2022 at the Callanish Stones, near the village of Callanish in the Outer Hebrides in Scotland, UK. Source: NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day

Gardening

A productive morning…

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… fresh from the garden direct to the kitchen!

four vinegar bottles on wooden table with a sprig of thyme
The robust potted thyme has been paired with apple cider vinegar and black peppercorns creating this summer’s herb infused vinegar.

five round rhubarb scone on a blue plate on a purple background
The last harvesting of this year’s rhubarb has been transformed into Rhubarb Pecan Scones and then tucked away for a chilly winter solstice breakfast. 
Knitting

Solstice Mittens

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blue-brown knit mittens
Slightly wonky but very warm fulled mittens

With winter storm warnings blinking on my computer tool bar and anticipated temperatures hovering below zero all day, it seemed the perfect time to wear my first ever fulled wool mittens. 

The timeline from knitting to fulling to wearing spans nearly a decade.  These mittens were knit between February – March 2013 during a course at a local fabric store no longer in business.  But the class only provided the pattern and a knitting circle on two evenings.  I took my new project home and worried about how to actually create the thick mittens without ruining my work.  I finally deduced that whether I ruined the mittens during the hot water agitated washing or if they simply continued to sit at the bottom of a wicker yarn basket, they were equally unwearable.  A Covid Finishing Fest hosted by Northfield Yarns in May 2020 gave me the impetus to watch several how-to videos and violà mittens!  Not needed with springtime temps, I tucked them away to be forgotten, thought lost, then found, and worn today for the first time.   

Happy winter solstice!

Note:  The distinction between fulling and felting is one of timing.  In the textile world, felting is a done with fibers, not with woven cloth while fulling describes the act of wet finishing the woven cloth or knitted item with water, temperature and agitation.

Baking

In the bleak midwinter … solstice sweets

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Each year we celebrate the Solstice, acknowledging the shortest day, celebrating a holy darkness, and enjoying a special meal.  In a year where nothing was as it was supposed to be, it felt even more important last night to gather fresh evergreens, bake a sweet treat and claim tradition.  

Needing a recipe that did not require an extra trip to the store since we had already picked up our drive-through, online order, I landed on Easy French Almond Cake from the café sucre farine.  Just as promised in the intro, “Incredibly delicious cake and it’s incredibly easy!”  I did modify it slightly (a baker’s prerogative) as I replaced the orange glaze and sliced almonds garnish with Cafe Delites’s homemade blueberry sauce.  Bon appétit!

In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter, long ago.
     Christina Rossetti, 1830-1894