The Shortest Day

I used to believe that the shortest day was on the 21st, by apparently like many other dates fixed in my mind, it moves, so today it is the shortest day here.
These are illustrations by Carson Ellis of Susan Cooper's book 'The Shortest Day'. You can see the influence of the 16th century Dutch painter Breugel in the arrangement of people and landscapes.

'The Shortest Day' is about the harshness and threat that winter posed to early man who faced freezing, illness, starvation and how powerful the solstice was as a marker of better times to come. 

Once our forebears learned to farm, they planted and harvested at the equinoxes, but it was the solstices that caught their attention. The extremes. They watched their days shrink from the bright abundance of high summer to the bleak, dark cold of winter, and they invented rituals to make sure the light would come back again: to bring the new day, the new year, the rebirth of life.
The rebirth rituals have become traditions we still celebrate, whether or not we remember where they came from. Susan Cooper