Do You Have Any Idea What Makes Tomorrow the Best Day Ever?

Ever since June, we've slowly been getting the shaft.

Since the end of June, the days have quietly been getting shorter. That is until October, when the days got short real fast when we "fell back" after Daylight Saving Time. It's funny, when I was a kid, I never really totally noticed it. But when I got older, it almost became like a quiet obsession, sitting around dreading when the days would get shorter.

But here we are, on December 21st, the shortest day of the entire year. The sun came up at 7:09, and will set tonight, I mean this afternoon, at 3:56. That's not even nine full hours of daylight. If you're someone who works the first shift, you basically drive to work in the dark and then drive home in the dark. That's gross.

Here's a few fun facts about the Winter Solstice.

According to WNYPapers.com, these are some things about the solstice we should care about:

• Depending on the hemisphere, the north or south pole will experience continuous darkness or twilight around its winter solstice.
• Even though the solstice is marked by a whole day on the calendar, it actually is just the brief moment of time when the sun is exactly over the Tropic of Capricorn.
• Tourists flock to Stonehenge to track the movement of the sun. The stones will frame the sunset on the winter solstice and the sunrise on the summer solstice.
• Each planet in the Earth’s solar system has its own solstices and equinoxes.
• The southern hemisphere experiences the winter solstice in June each year.

There's more of course, but that gives you an idea of why else it's important, other than to give us the very shortest day of the year.

So that means tomorrow, on December 22nd, we will begin gaining daylight.

How cool is that? Finally, the days will begin to get a bit longer. It starts off pretty slowly, but by the time January kicks in, we'll be gaining about two minutes a day. By February, we should actually start seeing daylight after 5:00pm. That would a dandy addition to our day, literally. That's why tomorrow is the awesomest day of the year.

If you live in Maine, you love or hate snow. These folks make a good case for both.