Zee Media Bureau/Liji Varghese
New Delhi: Internet search engine giant Google celebrated the First Day of Winter, also called the Winter Solstice, with a special doodle on its homepage on Saturday.
The doodle has a hand knitting colourful wools into a hand glove that forms into the word Google.
Winter solstice marks the official onset of winter, when the sun reaches a point where it will appear to shine farthest to the south of the equator, over the Tropic of Capricorn, which this year is on December 21.
In the northern hemisphere, the winter solstice marks the shortest day and the longest night, but the sun continues to rise later for some days afterwards. On this day the sun stops moving southward, pauses, and then starts moving northward. This pause is called the "solstice," from the Latin words "sol" for "sun" and "sisto" for "stop."