Four Hours of Daylight

The days start to dissolve into twilights close to four o’clock, and nine o’clock in the morning looks like a depth of the night. At this point Hafnarfjörður looks much more charming during the dark hours when all the lights brighten up its appearance and conceal rubbish on the streets.

Mecellaneous discoveries and achivements of the weekend:

• We put up and decorated our Christmas tree.
• Finish the Christmas cards (yes, we are this organized this year)
• Put yet another several boxes up to the attic (which includes a peril of balancing yourself and a box on the ladder going straight up, so nobody is fond of this activity)
• In a celebration of the first day of winter tried a new dish – oven baked leg of lamb on potatoes. It proved to be unsuccessful with my family. “It is edible”, was the highest compliment.
• Discovered the works of Cy Twombly.
• Learn how to say “cute” in Japanese “kawaii”.
• Found out that during the Victorian era the “lower limbs” considered to be so provocative that even table legs inside the house were covered. Table legs, really?
• Found out that popular Christmas song “The Twelve Day of Christmas” was used as a mnemonic device to teach catechism to the kids. The “true love”, which always perplexed me, refers to God Himself, two Turte Doves are the Old and New Testaments, Three French Hens are Faith, Hope and Charity, etc.

Sunrise-Sunset

I didn’t realize how fast we loose daylight until I start checking this information in a newspaper. Just on Saturday the sunrise was at 9:16 with sunset at 17:06, and today, three days later, we had the sunrise at 9:32 with promised sunset at 16:50, which means that we lost full 32 minutes of daylight in less than a week. Everybody has harder time to get up in the mornings and the weather is gloomy: grey and rainy. On the bright side, it isn’t cold, the temperature haven’t dropped lower than -5 C.

With darkness creeping in everything connected with the Sun, light acquire special meaning. I found myself collecting Icelandic words with this root. Here is the word “sólaruprás”, where you can easily distinguish universal “solar” + “up” + modified but still recognizable “raise”; sunset seems to have two words “sólarlag” found in the newspaper and “sólsetur” found in the dictionary and then there is beautiful “sólarljós”, which is sunlight, with “ljós” being light, brightness. Surprisingly daylight will be “dagsbirta”, completely different root. And, the biggest surprise of all on my treasure hunt is “ljósmóðir” – a midwife, mother of light literally.