aurora

The shortest day of the year, December 21, gives us an occasion to learn some vocabulary associated with the night sky: the Earth, the stars, and darkness.

People's first names have meaning in the sense that, when one is chosen from thousands of possibilities, it's usually picked because it has some special significance. But these names have another kind of meaning — they're also words that you can look up in the dictionary and use in other senses, beyond just what you've decided to call your pet parakeet or your first child.

This first book of His Dark Materials trilogy starts off at Oxford's Jordan College, where eleven-year-old Lyra Belacqua and her dæmon Pantalaimon are given a device called an alethiometer that Lyra learns to interpret in order to discover truths, especially in connection to the kidnapping of children.