This Is Winter? : Beginning of the Season Is Drenched in Sunshine

Depending on your point of view, Tuesday was either the shortest day of the yearor 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, giving astrologers an excuse to take the day off and inspiring 250,000 earth lovers around the world to spend their lunch hours chanting “oms” for peace.

For the most part, though, the winter solstice 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.”

For the record, the solstice occurred at 12:26 p.m., when the sun was at 32.5 degrees above the horizon.

It was an event of intense interest in ancient times, when mankind depended on the sun for heat and light. Winter festivals were held to celebrate the rebirth of the sun and the return of spring as days gradually got longer. 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 lights are holdovers from pagan celebrations.

To those who live and die by the stars, the solstice still is an important milestone in the earth’s progression--so much so that many took the day off 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 predicted we will all 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.

As founder of the Global Peace Foundation, David of Mill Valley--he goes simply by David, his spiritual name--helped organize a worldwide meditation for peace to mark the solstice.

“It was like a wave of om moving across the planet,” he said, explaining that om is the sound of peace.

The solstice, David explained, 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 oming going on in California.”