looduskalender.ee

 

Kooraste Pikkjärv lake

 

This year’s calendar autumn ends with an abundance of snow. On December 22, at 1.38 am, winter begins. The sun is then at the southernmost point of its journey. Daylength is just a few minutes over 6 hours. A scanty hour of dusk in morning and evening, and the length of night is nearly 16 hours. But the light from the snow has helped against the autumn darkness.

 

Oskar Loorits has written:

For us the winter solstice is not a moment of darkness, but of the birth of new hope and light. The changes of the solstices did not evoke in the Fenno-Ugrian tribes a sense of winter as a period of loss and endings, but rather an anticipation of the birth of summer…

 

(Oskar Loorits, 1900 - 1961, Estonian folk lorist)