The winter solstice is the shortest day and longest night of the year, marking the start of the winter season in the Northern Hemisphere Skyler Caruso is a Writer and Reporter of PEOPLE Digital ...

It is never easy to get up from a warm bed into a cold and dark winter morning ... A poem for this very day, the solstice, the shortest day, what John Donne called the ‘year’s midnight ...

The exact moment of the winter solstice varies from year to year due to a slight misalignment between the Gregorian calendar and the actual rate of the Earth’s rotation around the sun.