As the USA prepares to celebrate Thanksgiving, and break up the time between Halloween (Samhain) and Christmas (Midwinter), it’s time once again for greenYgreyliens and POPolutionaries to party like its spring/summer again in the U.K. and northern hemisphere: MIST and mistYmuse (combining MIST [Most Ideal Sunrise Times, November 21st – January 21st] and MUSE [Midwinter Until Spring Equinox, January 21st – March 21st] eves.
The more serious side is that it hopefully helps people who don’t like the winter, such as SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) sufferers survive the harsher weather and reduced sunlight of the next four months. I noticed Iceland has a similar strategy when I visited in January, as they keep their winter decorations up until spring!
The positive side to this time of year for me is that sunrises are later in the morning (8-9am, instead of the early hours in midsummer), and there isn’t too long until the sunset twilight time; only about seven or eight hours later.
New Pagan Festival
It’s one of the newest pagan festivals in the human world, but not the only one, and open to non-pagans too of course. The sky is for everybody.
Last year when I was in the USA my visit coincided with the summer Manhattanhenge, when New Yorkers celebrate the best day of the year for the sunset and sunrise lining up between the skyscrapers, as the stone henge builders of prehistoric times built their great structures to receive the light at special times of the year: solstices (December and June) and equinoxes (March and September) around the 21st of the month. I didn’t know about if before, and saw it in the media. It’s also on Wikipedia.
In the UK, Milton Keynes was built with that in mind, I found out after looking up Manhattenhenge on Wikipedia above.
POP if You Want To
As I believe the sky is for everybody, I also think it’s up to you what you see or want to see there. I’ve been pushing POP (PinkyOrangePurple) as the more normal colour combination to the traditional red (pre-POPularised by the red sky at night and red sky in the morning proverbs), but sometimes there is only one or two colours, and there is rare red. So if you see red you see red, and don’t feel under any obligation to POP all the time.
Last week I was lucky to see a pretty good POP sunset. Here’s some photos:
I wrote about twilight times a lot in XaW Files, when I first noticed the POP (PinkyOrangePurple) dominant colours, sometimes writing at this time of the year. I think it would make a great Winter Solstice Christmas present.
Travel 25 Years... and more 