It Was a Special Day, Even Though It Didn’t Last Long : Solstice: About 10 short hours were enough for an astrologer to map out 1994 and planet devotees to mount a meditation for peace.

Depending on your point of view, Tuesday was either the shortest day of the year or the longest night, if only by a minute.

For just nine hours and 53 minutes, the sun skirted along the southern edge of a cloudless sky, marking the beginning of winter. Astrologers were handed an excuse to take the day off and 250,000 Earth lovers around the world got the opportunity to spend their lunch hours om-ing for peace.

For the most part, though, the winter solstice--all the rage when fire was as cutting edge as CD-ROM--passed with nary a mention on a day of near-perfect Southern California weather.

“Until you called, I wasn’t even aware today was the winter solstice,” said the owner of a Studio City telescope shop. “That’s how important it is to me.”

Obviously, solstice science has failed to interest serious astronomers. (For the record, the solstice occurred at 12:26 p.m., when the sun was at 32.5 degrees above the horizon.) It was, however, of intense interest in ancient times, when man depended solely upon the sun for heat and light.

Winter festivals were held to celebrate the rebirth of the sun and the return of spring as the days gradually got longer. Today, for example, will be one minute longer than Tuesday was. Early Christians appropriated the solstice holiday to celebrate Christmas.

“They just put their holidays on top of the old pagan holidays,” said Mary Kara, owner of the Psychic Eye bookshop in Sherman Oaks. In fact, Christmas trees and twinkling lights are holdovers from pagan celebrations.

To those who live and die by the stars, the solstice remains an important milestone in the Earth’s progression--so much so that many took the day off from work to celebrate.

“Without the sun, everything would perish,” said Helene Cushman, a Tarzana astrologer who explained that the solstice “gives us a good tool to predict what the coming year has in store for us.”

Cushman predicts that we will spend a lot of time in 1994 worrying about our safety and trying to restore order to our communities.

“We are going to become rather a police state,” she said.

Curtis Brack, a meteorologist with WeatherData Inc., which provides forecasts to The Times, also studies the heavens to divine the future. And he predicts more days like Tuesday, with highs in the 60s and 70s, lows in the 30s and 40s.

David, of Mill Valley--he goes simply by David, his spiritual name, pronounced like the artist’s--helped organize a worldwide meditation for peace to celebrate the solstice.

“It was like a wave of om moving across the planet,” said David, the founder of the Global Peace Foundation. Om is the the sound of peace, he explained.

The solstice, he said, is “the point between light and darkness when the sun sends a shaft of light into the core of the Earth. It’s almost sexual. This may sound way out, but it’s actually true.”

David’s co-creator of the global peace meditation was Shivia, who called from Chicago to say: “I can feel the energy of all the om-ing going on in California.”

Um. . . .