Trivia about the winter solstice

[coriolis]

While December 21st is the day of the least amount of sunlight, it is not the day that the sun rises the latest and that the sun sets the earliest.

The earliest sunset is on December 8th and the latest sunrise is on January 5th.

This is due to the fact that the earth's orbit is not a perfect circle, and in some portions of the orbit the earth is traveling "faster" than others. The geometry gets complicated and I haven't taken the time to work through understanding it all.

For more information, here's a link to start with:

http://aa.usno.navy.mil/faq/docs/dark_days.html