It is dark outside when the alarm goes off, not at all a time to wake up. The usual 8 hours and 41 minutes of daylight we can expect on a Winter Solstice is never enough to keep us going, even on a relatively warm and sometimes even bright year like this. The icy Winter of 2013 is just as dark as any other. The Solstice itself, that magic moment when the North Pole starts to wobble back towards the sun, comes on 21 December at exactly 17:11 UTC/GMT (11:11 CST).
This is the end of the year traditionally. The new year should begin at Solstice, as is the ancient European tradition, just as the day begins at midnight. The only reason it doesn’t is that the Romans used a calendar, the Julian, that was off a bit by the time Pope Gregory XIII got around to revising it and everything moved ten days. No matter. The world since the Renaissance has increasingly been what we decree, not what we see.
Barataria - The work of Erik Hare 