Winter Solstice

andrea_lunsford
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‎12-22-2016 09:45 AM

156952_bells-1065015_1280.jpgThere are many reasons to observe the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, which falls on Wednesday, December 21 in 2016.  I hope to be at a friend’s home, which was designed to catch the light in special ways at noon on the solstice, so I am hoping for some special effects from Mother Nature.  The solstice leads up to Hanukkah, which begins on December 24, and to Christmas the next day and then Kwanzaa on the 26th. 

In what has been a dark season for me and many others, I am wishing peace and light for everyone.  I will be thinking, through all these holidays, of students everywhere and hoping that the right to an education will be a human right, all around the world.

In the words of Leonard Cohen, I am going to ring every bell that will ring, and seek out the light wherever I can:

Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack, a crack in everything

That’s how the light gets in.      

                 --Leonard Cohen, “Anthem”

[Photo: bells by deshkhanna on Pixabay]

About the Author
Andrea A. Lunsford is the former director of the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford University and teaches at the Bread Loaf School of English. A past chair of CCCC, she has won the major publication awards in both the CCCC and MLA. For Bedford/St. Martin's, she is the author of The St. Martin's Handbook, The Everyday Writer and EasyWriter; The Presence of Others and Everything's an Argument with John Ruszkiewicz; and Everything's an Argument with Readings with John Ruszkiewicz and Keith Walters. She has never met a student she didn’t like—and she is excited about the possibilities for writers in the “literacy revolution” brought about by today’s technology. In addition to Andrea’s regular blog posts inspired by her teaching, reading, and traveling, her “Multimodal Mondays” posts offer ideas for introducing low-stakes multimodal assignments to the composition classroom.