Happy holidays and Happy Solstice! Given that this is the shortest period of daylight and the longest night of the year for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, we want to send extra holiday cheer your way from all of us here at Digital Commons!
We are grateful to the Digital Commons community for allowing us to partner with you and for enriching our work lives by sharing your day-to-day IR journeys with us as well as your stellar successes. We are also grateful this year to be welcoming American and international Elsevier colleagues who now make their home with us in Berkeley and from afar — they are all helping us to deliver customer holiday wishes and adding their diverse traditions to ours.
Continuing our tradition of celebrating unique content across Digital Commons repositories, this year we offer you a guide to Solstice travel among Irish prehistoric monuments in Solar Alignment and the Irish Passage Tomb Tradition from the Dublin Institute of Technology. In addition, the sacred sites of Glastonbury in Somerset, England, have long been places of pilgrimage, as DIT’s International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage explains in Enacting the Glastonbury Pilgrimage through Communitas and Aural/Visual Culture. A professor at University of Montana describes the complexity of Native American belief systems in What winter solstice rituals tell us about indigenous people.
From ancient topography to cutting-edge research from the Physics Faculty at Utah State University on the Southern Hemisphere’s June Solstice, we learn that “Typical equatorial spread-F events are often said to occur during post-sunset, equinox conditions…” and that researchers in the School of Natural Resources at University of Nebraska – Lincoln are pioneering a “winter season severity index.” All we can say is that we hope your ‘post-sunset events’ include good cheer, good food, and good friends this holiday season and that your ‘winter severity index’ remains calm!
Image by Kathyrn R. Barush https://arrow.dit.ie/ijrtp/vol6/iss2/5/
