Day of the Last Across, 1st of Hagwinter 526 M.E. (Helios): Seasons change. Once it was Autumn, now it's Hagwinter. Right on schedule, a rare, early-season Sudden Stratospheric Warming event and polar-vortex disruption are forecast to bring cold air down to Georgia and the Southern United Snakes. Prepare yourselves - there's a cold wind coming our way.   

Hagwinter is the last of the six seasons in the New Revised Universal Solar Calendar. Following old Angus MacLise's original USC, the winter is split into Childwinter at the start of the year and Hagwinter at the end. However, unlike MacLise's calendar, the two winter seasons are each shorter (61 days) than the original 73 days each.

The other seasons start and end with theme-named days. For example, Autumn started with First Day of Quest and ended with Last Day of Quest. That convention is discarded in this final season and instead it follows the surrealist poetry of MacLise's original names. Hagwinter starts with Day of the Last Across, which seems fitting as we embark on the journey across the last season of the year, and ends with Into the Whirring Yards, which doesn't make any literal sense but still sounds apt as we head into the great uncertainty of the year 527. 

The 43rd day of Hagwinter is the 348th day of the year, the 29th dozen, so it is the twelfth Ocean day in the New Revised USC. I would have made Twelfth Ocean fall on the more auspicious 30th and final dozenth day of the year, the 55th day of Hagwinter, but that day is the Christmas holiday, and I couldn't resist moving the name Day of the Magic Child to that holiday. 

The winter solstice falls on the 44th day of Hagwinter and is aptly called Humming of the Distances of the Planet.  Also, each season has a five-day sequence of names, and in Hagwinter the 44th through the 48th days are First Day of Quandary through Fifth Day of Quandary. So overall, the calendar for Hagwinter looks like this:              

Each season, this blog adopts a new avatar for the daily images. It was the blind albino for Childwinter, the Earth Mother for Spring, the Sun Girl for Midsommar, the anthropomorphic Weimaraner hound for the Dog Days, and the Retired Old Man for Autumn. The obvious choice for Hagwinter is an old hag, but when I did that in Hagwinters past, the severe appearance of the avatar limited its utility in images after the first week or two. So this year, I'm softening up the winter's hag appearance to be, instead of some witch or wraith, simply a woman "of a certain age," as they say. It also probably won't be the same woman each and every day. It's Hagwinter season, but not season of the Winter Hag.   

To be honest, I don't know why I do this, why I've developed my own version of a fantasy calendar for this blog. But now that I have, I'm trapped in this prison of my own device and don't see an easy way out, at least until the start of the new year. So please bear with me and tolerate this eccentricity, and rest assured that I haven't (completely) lost my mind.