Wait for it… wait for it… here comes the sun!

OK, so the days are short and the nights are long. It’s winter, after all.

But look on the bright side: The solstice has passed, the wee days are creeping slightly longer, the groundhog has spoken, and before you know it the long lazy days of summer will be here!

Oh, I know, some cold days are still ahead. It takes the planet a few months to figure out how to turn all those extra minutes of sunlight into heat.

But still, it could be worse. It’s all in where you happen to be standing at the time.

They say that every spot on the planet gets exactly the same amount of sunshine as any other spot on the planet, even though the balance may be different at any given time. You just have to stand still for a whole year to get your equal share.

If you have been standing still at the North Pole lately, you’ve been in total blackness since early October. You’ll have to wait until March to see the dawn of another day—which will last for six months.

Of course, if you’ve been standing still at the South Pole, you’ve had the last four months to work on your tan.

You don’t have to go that far to see the difference. Just within the continental United States, the difference in daylight these days can vary by as much as two hours. Seattle sees only eight-and-a-half hours of daylight at Christmas, while Miami enjoys ten and a half hours of Yule sun.

But with patience, Seattleans can rest assured that they will make up the difference. In June, while Floridians will see about 14 hours of sun, folks in Seattle will basking for almost 16 hours of daylight—if you can call sitting in the rain “basking.”

Of course, all bets are off if you don’t sit in one place for a whole year. Just ask all those sun-drenched snowbirds who steal more than their allotted share of rays as they motor south for the winter, and then head back north in the spring.

The longest day of my life took place some years ago when I happened to spend the summer solstice in Reykjavik, Iceland. It was followed, of course, by the shortest night of my life. And when you’re visiting Iceland on the summer solstice, who can resist the temptation to “party the night away” when night lasts less than four hours?

Actually, it’s a bit of a misnomer to call it “night” on the summer solstice in Iceland. Oh, the sun dips below the horizon as it sweeps past the last few degrees of the northwestern sky before rising in the nearby northeast, but it never gets darker than a slow-dimming dusk.

If you want to see what it’s like in the middle of night in Reykjavik on the summer solstice, walk outside your house at noon on a bleak, overcast day. That’s midnight in Iceland in June. Bring a newspaper with you, because you’ll be able to read it with nary a squint. The only reason to turn on your headlights in June in Iceland is that there’s probably a law requiring you to do it.

On any other June night in Reykjavik—other than on the solstice when you’re trying to party from dusk until dawn just to prove you can do it—you’re likely to go to bed in daylight and wake up wondering if night happened at all. It can be a bit unsettling to see all that unsetting sun.

The benefits of near-endless sunshine, of course, can be seen when you look at an Icelandic cabbage growing in a garden, which can reach championship-pumpkin proportions. You could make a year’s worth of cole slaw from a single Icelandic cabbage. And you’d have endless summer days to try to figure out what to do with it all.

Of course, all that changes in December, when Icelanders only get to see the sun for about as long as it takes to watch a baseball game. Well…that’s a bad analogy, because it’s impossible to stay awake for a whole baseball game. Let’s just say that it takes all day to roast a Christmas turkey in Iceland.

And the December sun in Iceland never rises very high in the sky, either, even at noon. Most structures in Reykjavik stand no taller than three stories, probably because the guy across the street would burn your building down for blocking out the timid winter sun if you built it any higher. People can get a bit testy when they wear their jammies for twenty hours straight.

Fortunately, there is no place in America with winters as bleak and dreary as that—well, except for Alaska, where Sarah Palin in Wasilla only has about five hours of December daylight to look out her window and watch what folks in Russia are doing.

For the rest of us, even the darkest days aren’t so bad. We can make a pot of coffee in the morning and rest assured that it’ll be cold by night time. Even in December.

So take heart, America, because the darkest days are already behind us.

Anyway, I’m sorry if I seem a bit rambling today, but I do my best work in the daytime, and the days are still pretty short, though they’re getting longer every day.

I’ll make a lot more sense in June. You’ll see. Just wait for it.

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