This month's date link is about as far outside of the tradition of redeeming forgotten significant events as I can get. After all, the Winter Solstice doesn't need me to get it's day in the sun (if it can be called that).

My father used to tell us that human culture started with the winter solstice: with the realization that the days were getting shorter, with the fear that they would shorten until the world would end, and with the attempt to intervene via various rituals in order to rectify the situation. It's fascinating to realize that all of those rituals, no matter to what god they were directed,  seem to have worked.

An AltaVista search yielded 10,652 web pages that mentioned the winter solstice. That's a substantial number (though for comparison's sake, a search on Sandra Bullock yields 40,566 pages). I admit that I wasn't really interested in checking out all of those pages (though that might link us to another thought in this month's column), just in finding a good basic information page. And if we're giving the sun credit here, I think that AltaVista deserves some as well.