layla | Winter Solstice 2014 (Reply)

For some the solstice is an important holiday (and may yours be lovely, if it is part of your faith!) but it tends to pass unremarked in the nonpagan world — unless you’re in the Arctic, where severe annual daylight changes make it impossible not to pay attention to the time of year when daylight hits its nadir and everything starts to get warm again.

Alaska is interesting in that regard because we belong to a larger culture that doesn’t have a tradition of noticing the solstices at all. The solstice, summer or winter, is not a thing in mainstream American culture. But this close to the Arctic Circle, it is definitely an important turning point in the year. Fairbanks has a summer solstice street fair and other events, and the winter one is marked by fireworks, which we went to last night.

My camera doesn’t take great night pictures, so I hedged my bets by resting it on my knee in lieu of a tripod and taking a lot of pictures (with the advantage that I could just enjoy the fireworks without worrying about framing shots). This of course resulted in a lot of fireworks that were mostly out of frame, but some of my pictures came out pretty neat!