"What day should we celebrate the winter solstice this year?" asks the wife, prompting both of us to run off and consult the internet for calendars. The first answer, for our purposes was "Friday." Great, so if we are to do our usual micro-blót, we should aim for Friday? I mean, technically, is Thursday night or Friday night the longer of the two?

And with this second question the avalanche of related questions and assumption-challenging begins.

Academic...what can you do?

Would it be more appropriate to celebrate Jul on the night of the shortest day of the year or on the day after the longest night of the year? Is the blót a supplication for an end to the growing darkness, or a celebration of the return of light? Does this shift things backwards to Thursday or forwards to Saturday?

This, of course, prompts another visit to the astronomical sites and another consultation of the times for sunset and the length of each respective night. For the record, Friday night is about one second longer than Thursday night and two seconds longer than Saturday night at our latitude.

So how would an Iron Age heathen perceive this difference? - Assuming that the Iron Age heathen in question is in a place where the sun rises and sets on solstice, how much of a difference in length would be apparent in an age before precision timepieces? The easier method for determining the length of the day, then, would be to measure the shadow of a vertical pole. And this brings with it questions of scale and precision and latitude for measuring the change from one day to the next. Is the difference between the noon marks for the three days in question significant enough to differentiate between them? Do the three days appear to be of like length and thus become a sort of liminal pause in the progression of the sun's journey that could either mark a shift back towards summer or a stop that needs a push or it threatens to extend or even settle into permanence?

Our worldview is shaped by complex and precise models of celestial motion. The necessity for deciding between a heliocentric and a geocentric model of celestial motion is much less apparent when the difference between these two things is greater than the margin of error inherent in the measurement of one's observations.

Shift out of a scientific worldview and into a mythic one and the differences become even more pronounced as the role of narrative and interlocking systems of reciprocal relationships increases.

All of which took a great deal of pressure off of our perceived need to be precise about our day of observation and instead invited a rethinking of what the day/s at the turn of the wheel should signify and how our ancestors viewed their relationship to nature and the seasons and the powers that influence these natural phenomena.

How would one know if this winter was a normal winter or fimbulvetr and what could be done if the days did not begin to grow in length as expected? How would a northward migration shift the corresponding worldview and the lore that governed one's relationships with the landvetter?

Perhaps these are more appropriate questions to ask than to seek out the precise date of the winter solstice.