- 345th Day of 2015 20 Remaining
- Winter Begins in 10 Days
- Sunrise: 7:15
- Sunset: 4:51
- 9 Hours 36 Minutes
- Moon Rise: 7:14am
- Moon Set: 5:36pm
- Phase: New Moon @ 5:29am
- Next Full Moon December 25 @ 3:11am
- The Full Cold Moon; or the Full Long Nights Moon – December During this month the winter cold fastens its grip, and nights are at their longest and darkest. It is also sometimes called the Moon before Yule. The term Long Night Moon is a doubly appropriate name because the midwinter night is indeed long, and because the Moon is above the horizon for a long time. The midwinter full Moon has a high trajectory across the sky because it is opposite a low Sun.
- Tides
- High: 9:55am/11:52pm
- Low: 4:00am/4:52pm
- Rainfall
- This Year: 1.97
- Last Year: 9.43
- YTD Avg.: 6.05
- Annual Avg.: 23.80
- Holidays
- Holiday Food Drive For Needy Animals Day
- National Noodle Ring Day
- National Salesperson’s Day
- Lost And Found Day
- International Mountain Day
- On This Day
- 1777 --- General George Washington begins marching 12,000 soldiers of his Continental Army from Whitemarsh to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, for the winter. As Washington’s men began crossing the Schuylkill River, they were surprised by a regiment of several thousand British troops led by General Charles Cornwallis. Cornwallis came across the continental forces by chance as he followed General William Howe’s orders to forage for supplies in the hills outside Philadelphia. Upon spotting General Cornwallis and the British troops, General Washington ordered his soldiers to retreat across the Schuylkill River, where they destroyed the bridge to prevent the British from pursuing them. After engaging the British for a short time from the opposite side of the river, Washington and the Continental Army retreated back to Whitemarsh, delaying their march to Valley Forge for several days.
- 1792 --- France's King Louis XVI went before the Convention, which had replaced the National Assembly, to face charges of treason. He was convicted and condemned and was sent to the guillotine the following January.
- 1816 --- Indiana became the 19th state.
- 1844 --- Nitrous oxide used in first successful surgical operation under anaesthetic. In Harford, Connecticut Dr. John M. Riggs extracted a tooth from fellow dentist Dr. Horace Wells.
- 1862 --- The Union Army of the Potomac occupies Fredericksburg, Virginia, as General Ambrose Burnside continues to execute his plan to capture the Confederate capital at Richmond, Virginia.However, the occupation did not happen until three weeks after Burnside’s army had arrived at Falmouth, Virginia, just across the river from Fredericksburg. Due to a logistical error, pontoon bridges had not been available so the army could not cross; the delay allowed Confederate General Robert E. Lee ample time to post his Army of Northern Virginia along Marye’s Heights above Fredericksburg.
- 1872 --- Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback became America's first black governor when he took office as acting governor of Louisiana.
- 1936 --- After ruling for less than one year, Edward VIII becomes the first English monarch to voluntarily abdicate the throne. He chose to abdicate after the British government, public, and the Church of England condemned his decision to marry the American divorcée Wallis Warfield Simpson. On the evening of December 11, he gave a radio address in which he explained, “I have found it impossible to carry on the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge the duties of king, as I would wish to do, without the help and support of the woman I love.” On December 12, his younger brother, the duke of York, was proclaimed King George VI.
- 1944 --- The city of Toronto, Canada, is battered with its worst-ever snowfall on this day in 1944. Twenty-one people died as a result of the record storm, in which nearly 20 inches of snow fell in a single day. The storm began hundreds of miles to the south near the Gulf of Mexico; it stalled after moving north over Toronto. In addition to the tremendous amount of snow, the winds from the storm were so high that visibility was reduced to nothing. The blizzard also created huge drifts that trapped people inside their homes.
- 1946 --- In the aftermath of World War II, the General Assembly of the United Nations votes to establish the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), an organization to help provide relief and support to children living in countries devastated by the war.
- 1951 --- The Yankees Joe DiMaggio announced his retirement from major league baseball. DiMaggio only played for the Yankees during his 13-year career.
- 1957 --- Jerry Lee Lewis secretly married his 13-year-old third cousin Myra Gale Brown. The marriage caused Lewis to be blacklisted from many radio stations and he was dropped from Dick Clark's shows.
- 1958 --- The Coasters recorded "Charlie Brown." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbBr2bgAbcM
- 1961 --- A U.S. aircraft carrier carrying Army helicopters arrived in Saigon - the first direct American military support for South Vietnam's battle against Communist guerrillas.
- 1964 --- In response to a reported shooting, officers of the Los Angeles Police Department were dispatched to the Hacienda Motel, where they found Sam Cooke dead on the office floor, shot three times in the chest by the motel’s manager, Bertha Franklin. The authorities ruled Cooke’s death a case of justifiable homicide, based on the testimony of Ms. Franklin, who claimed that Cooke had threatened her life after sexually assaulting a young woman with whom he had earlier checked in.
- 1970 --- Ringo Starr's movie "The Magic Christian" premiered in London.
- 1972 --- Man landed on the moon for the last time during the Apollo 17 mission.
- 1973 --- West German Chancellor Willy Brandt and Czech Prime Minister Lubomir Strougal formally nullified the 1938 Munich pact when they signed a treaty sanctioning Hitler's seizure of Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland.
- 1991 --- Salman Rushdie, under an Islamic death sentence for blasphemy, made his first public appearance since 1989 in New York, at a dinner marking the 200th anniversary of the First Amendment (which guarantees freedom of speech in the U.S.).
- 1994 --- In the largest Russian military offensive since the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan, thousands of troops and hundreds of tanks pour into the breakaway Russian republic of Chechnya. Encountering only light resistance, Russian forces had by evening pushed to the outskirts of the Chechen capital of Grozny, where several thousand Chechen volunteers vowed a bitter fight against the Russians.
- 1997 --- Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams became the first political ally of the IRA to meet a British leader in 76 years. He conferred with Prime Minister Tony Blair in London.
- 1998 --- The Mars Climate Orbiter blasted off on a nine-month journey to the Red Planet. However, the probe disappeared in September of 1999, apparently destroyed because scientists had failed to convert English measures to metric values.
- 2001 --- U.S. Attorney General Ashcroft announced the first federal indictment directly related to the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001. Zacarias Moussaoui was charged with six conspiracy charges. Moussaoui was in custody at the time of the attacks.
- 2008 --- Financier Bernard Madoff is arrested at his New York City apartment and charged with masterminding a long-running Ponzi scheme later estimated to involve around $65 billion, making it one of the biggest investment frauds in Wall Street history.
- 2009 --- The game Angry Birds was released.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNNzRyd1xz0
- Birthdays
- Carlo Ponti
- Rita Moreno
- Donna Mills
- Alexander Slozhenitsyn
- Lynda Day George
- Mo’Nique
- Jermaine Jackson
- Teri Garr
- Brenda Lee
- Annie Jump Cannon
- James L Kraft
- David Gates
- Fiorello La Guardia
International Mountain Day-KALW Almanac-12/11/2015
