Winter’s world

Today is the winter solstice and shortest day here in NZ – so “Happy Solstice” to those that celebrate it as a festival.

The Maori New Year festival of Matariki will be marked a little later, on July 2 – traditionally the celebration commences when the Pleiades reappear in southern skies and is aligned to the new moon rather than the sun.

Kowhai: flowers in winter

On Thursday I refeatured a post on winter worlds from the blog backlist and mentioned Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand Of Darkness in that context. The world of Gethen, also known as Winter, is probably one of *the* defining winter worlds of speculative fiction.

Yet when it comes to solstice and new year festivals, Ms Le Guin’s Sunreturn, in her enduring children’s classic, A Wizard of Earthsea, is among my favourites. It’s a midwinter festival marked throughout the archipelagoes of Earthsea, with people drumming and dancing through the torch and bonfire lit darkness of the longest night, to invoke the return of the sun and life.

The essence of the festival is evoked in a handful of sentences but like so much of Ursula Le Guin’s writing, it captures the imagination and endures.

In Hogwarts, of course, they would have a glorious banquet. I suspect there may have been a few midwinter feasts here in NZ over the past weekend, with more coming up for Matariki – if only to fortify ourselves for the colder weather that tends to follow the solstice, i.e. as the days grow longer the nights get colder, for a time at least.

A feast of colour, if less “stupendous” than Hogwarts. 😉

The ideal season for storytelling, wouldn’t you say? 🙂