Winter Solstice 2025

Snow moon over Hubbard Lake, MI

12/21/25

This morning at 10:03AM Eastern Time, Earth reached its maximum tilt away from the Sun and began a reverse trajectory that will conclude on Summer Solstice 2026.

Today Winter officially arrives.

"The Solstice is a time of quietude, of firelight, and dreaming, when seeds germinate in the cold earth, and the cold notes of church bells mingle with the chimes of icicles. Rivers are stilled and the land lies waiting beneath a coverlet of snow. We watch the cold sunlight and the bright stars, maybe go for walks in the quiet land. . . . All around us the season seems to reach a standstill — a point of repose."

• John Matthews

The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter

To regard the frost and the boughs

Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time

To behold the junipers shagged with ice,

The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think

Of any misery in the sound of the wind,

In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land

Full of the same wind

That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,

And, nothing himself, beholds

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

-Wallace Stephens

May we be willing to perceive fully the starkness of Winter and to accept the often cold, rational truth of life’s bitter circumstances, without missing the snow moon's radiance among the pink and lavender skies of Winter.

CPW