Eric’s Blog

I’m a HUGE Doctor Who fan or Whovian as I suppose we’re sometimes called. The Christmas special is always something I look forward to every year. My absolute favorite Doctor Who Christmas Special is A Christmas Carol where The Doctor has to save Amy, Rory, and a spaceship full of people from crashing by convincing a cantankerous, old, miser named Kazran Sardick (i.e. Ebeneezer Scrooge played by Michael Gambon), to let the spaceship land safely on an alien planet where he controls the weather.

This special is filled with tons of Doctor Who-isms and a lot of them are great, but one of the best is the Dickens-esque narration performed by Gambon at the beginning of the episode…

“On every world, wherever people are, in the deepest part of the winter, at the exact mid-point, everybody stops and turns and hugs. As if to say, Well done. Well done, everyone! We’re halfway out of the dark. Back on Earth we call this Christmas. Or the Winter Solstice. On this world, the first settlers called it The Crystal Feast. You know what I call it? I call it expecting something for nothing!”

And the adventure begins…the doctor plays the role of the Ghost of Christmas Past bouncing across Kazran’s timeline trying to figure out why he’s so grumpy and won’t let the spaceship land all whilst spouting wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey bits of amazing dialogue, and generally being the love-able, madcap, raggedy doctor that he his.

But I digress…even though Doctor Who is AWESOME, I mainly want to focus on the opening bit of narration. That day is today, the Winter Solstice, the First Day of Winter, halfway out of the dark. From this point on, the days will get longer, and the nights get shorter. It’s a time where we put away our petty differences and focus on the fact that it’s a time of hope all across our world; that the darkness is on its way out, and light is coming back.

I’d like to say that the light is coming back to everyone across the universe, but for the moment, Earth is the only place that we know of that contains life, and any planets where today is the Winter Solstice would also have to have 23 & 1/2 degree axial tilt the same as Earth, and I don’t like to generalize.

A bit closer to home, people in the southern hemisphere are actually getting ready for shorter days and longer nights. They’re having summer right now and we’re having winter. Sorry folks, you had your turn, now it’s our go. By the way, does it make your head spin to realize that you’re upside-down from the rest of us? Relativity is a funny thing, isn’t it?

At any rate, our Gregorian calendars are the same as the folks in the southern hemisphere, and today is the Winter Solstice, so I say, “Well done. Well done, everyone! We’re halfway out of the dark.”