December: On & Off Earth

December 2025 - On & Off Earth

While the human world in a’buzz with activity in December, out on the planet, December’s themes are simple: dark and cold. Life in the forest is in hunker down, survival mode. Most lingering leaves were ripped loose by the gales of November, opening up the views through the trees but there is not much activity to see. Any creature that can hibernate, is already deep in slumberland. Those that don’t take a long winter nap are stealthy in their search for a meal, wary of becoming someone else’s meal. It’s mostly quiet in the woods.

December’s dark theme is painfully obvious with the sunset time stuck for the first 12 days of the month at 4:51pm (officially in RVA). Pearl Harbor Day is the absolute earliest. The moonlight add-on at twilight ends with the Full Cold (or Long Night) moon, another Super Moon, on the 4th. The moon doesn’t add its evening, waxing light again until the last week of the month. The sun begins the month in the constellation Ophiuchus before sliding back into a standard zodiacal sign, Sagittarius, on the 19th. The 21st is the longest night of the year, the Winter Solstice; the moment of the northern hemisphere’s greatest tilt from the sun, at 10:03am that morning.

Criss-crossing the Hershey Dog Creek (not the official name, there is no official name..) every day, I have watched the flow slow from a July peak to tiny pools in August, to damp, then dry sediment and rock into the Fall. Then the mystery that is groundwater, began, without a drop of rain, to form puddles upstream as the leaves began to change colors. Every few days, a new pool would appear a little farther downstream until by mid-November there was a creek, almost. The water just sat there, it did not flow.

I am sure there are geohydrologists and well drillers that will claim they understand where that water came from, without any appreciable rain falling but I am not one of them. On the Great Plains groundwater is easy; the melting of the last great ice sheets filled the pore spaces in the thousands of feet of fairly flat sediment/rock that has been, for millions of years, washing off the rising, eroding Rockies. Pretty simple.

Here in the tilted, fractured, old metamorphic rock bands beneath our Piedmont world things are not so simple. Sure, plentiful rain soaks in (infiltrates) and adds to the groundwater but what if there is no rain. Where does that water come from? How old is it? Is it, also, remnant, ice-age glacial melt? The reappearing creek raised the questions, I will not, as I often do, fling a guess at those questions. Got all the answers, let me know.

Stepping out into the December air I am quickly aware of the second of Earth’s December themes; COLD. I need more clothes, ’tis the season for layers. Properly attired, this month offers bracing air, few pesky biting critters and subtle sights and sounds and smells that were masked by the green, fecund world now gone dormant. A brisk walk this time of year, also, gets you quickly away from the hustle and bustle of shopping and holiday gathering demands. If you’re able to make that stroll along a forested path, even better.

I didn’t get out Thanksgiving night but I did the next night and will tonight. The magic moment: the sudden switch from faint twilight to bright moonlight. Yes, that is a moon shadow following you!

That's it...Today On Earth

Bundle up and get out before the rain arrives...moon will be spectacular!!