"Althouse captures the exact moment the light pierces the center of the dome — the sign ushering in the season of Brumalia?"

Said Ingachuck'stoothlessARM in the comments to last night's open thread, which had my photograph of a view across Lake Mendota that showed the Wisconsin state capitol building at daybreak. 

There's a moment at this time of year when the sun aligns with windows on either side of the dome and it looks, from the distance, as if there's a blazing fire inside. It's just a tiny dot in the photograph, and I was glad to see it noticed. 

The commenter cites Brumalia:

Brumalia (Latin: Brumalia [bruːˈmaːlɪ.a], "winter festivals") was an ancient Roman, winter solstice festival honouring Saturn/Cronus and Ceres/Demeter, and Bacchus in some cases. By the Byzantine era, celebrations commenced on 24 November and lasted for a month, until Saturnalia and the "Waxing of the Light". The festival included night-time feasting, drinking, and merriment.... The short, cold days of winter would halt most forms of work. Brumalia was a festival celebrated during this dark, interludal period. It was chthonic in character and associated with crops.... Farmers would sacrifice pigs to Saturn and Ceres. Vine-growers would sacrifice goats in honor of Bacchus.... 

My word for this time of year is "Darkmonth," and today marks the first day of Darkmonth. I put the solstice in the center — it's December 21st — and count back 15 days to get to the first day, and that is today, the 6th. We have not yet reached the coldest month-long period of the year — and you never know exactly when that's going to be (and it's very rarely 30 consecutive days). But we have reached the 30 darkest days of the year, and by the first day of winter, we'll be halfway through the darkest month. 

I can see that Saturnalia is a more optimistic idea, because you're not saying only 2 more weeks of the darkest month, but it's the waxing of the light. Each day is a bit more light — even as the coldest days are yet to come. 

Here's the first post where I talked about Darkmonth — in the first year of this blog, 2004. I like that Meade shows up and makes the first comment — in 2009, the year that we met. By the way, it was Meade who first saw the dot of sunrise light burning up the inside of the capitol and made me see it too. 

Song cue:

 

Some people work very hard/But still they never get it right...

Like Brumalia to Darkmonth, there's also this other song with the same title.

"If you don't want my peaches, honey, please don't shake my tree."

Early peaches, this morning:



Peaches on a peach tree naturally makes me think of song lyrics, and I found this on Wikipedia:

The ‘peaches’ verse ["If you don't like my peaches/Don't you shake my tree/'n Get out of my orchard/Let my peaches be," in "Sitting on Top of the World"] has a long history in popular music. It appears as the chorus of an unpublished song composed by Irving Berlin in May 1914: “If you don't want my peaches / You'd better stop shaking my tree.” The song "Mamma's Got the Blues", written by Clarence Williams and S. Martin and recorded by Bessie Smith in 1923, has the line: "If you don't like my peaches then let my orchard be". In her version of "St. Louis Blues", Ella Fitzgerald sang, "If you don't like my peaches, why do you shake my tree? / Stay out of my orchard, and let my peach tree be". In 1929 Blind Lemon Jefferson recorded “Peach Orchard Mama” ("... you swore nobody’d pick your fruit but me / I found three kid men shaking down your peaches free"). In later years lines using similar imagery were used in “Matchbox” by Carl Perkins and “The Joker” by the Steve Miller Band. Ahmet Ertegun was able to convince Miller to pay him US$50,000, claiming authorship of the line in his song "Lovey Dovey". This verse and its ubiquitous usage is an example of the tradition of ‘floating lyrics’ (also called 'maverick stanzas') in folk-music tradition.

In "The Joker," it's "You're the cutest thing that I ever did see/I really love your peaches, wanna shake your tree." Video.

"Matchbox" is the most familiar one to me, and it's the version I've put in the post title: "If you don't want my peaches, honey, please don't shake my tree." (Here's Carl Perkins, performing the song I learned from The Beatles.) Though the history of the "floating lyric" suggests the opposite, Carl is talking about the masculine anatomy.