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We’re a bit late.

But that’s OK. It should be fun just the same.

Mocksville is hosting its first Autumn Equinox Festival on Saturday. You read that right – Autumn Equinox Festival.

To be honest, I wasn’t sure what that meant. So I looked it up.

It turns out the Autumn Equinox is nothing more than the first day of fall, or autumn. That was Sept. 22. The “equinox” part, according to The Farmer’s Almanac, is when the sun crosses the celestial equator – an imaginary line of the equator way up in space.

We’re a few weeks late, but we’re celebrating the autumn equinox this Saturday. Whatever happened to The Oaks Festival? Wasn’t high brow enough, I guess.

Here are a few more facts – and superstitions, you decide which is which – about the autumn equinox.

Days become shorter than nights. On the equinox, day and night are just about the same.

The full moon nearest the autumn equinox is called the Harvest Moon. Why? The full moon rises around sunset, providing farmers enough extra light to get their crops in. The Harvest Moon can happen in September or October. This year it was in September.

Fall foliage blossoms. Those leaf colors aren’t caused by current weather conditions, it has to do more with the amount of sunlight and photosynthesis (Look it up if you can’t remember your elementary school science lessons.)

Birds and butterflies began migrating South. It’s not because of those shorter days and cooler temperatures. It’s because the arc of the sun changes as it crosses the sky. They follow the arc of the sun.

Stonehenge was built based on the equinox. In Mexico, ancient Mayans built a pyramid that during an equinox, it appears as if a snake made of light is slithering down the it’s steps.

An Autumn Equinox Festival. What will they think of next?

How about a Winter Solstice Festival? That happens on Dec. 21 at 4:21 a.m. It’s the first day of winter. It comes from the Latin words sol (sun) and sistere (to stand still), when the angle between the sun’s rays and the plane of the earth’s equator appears to stand still. That’s from The Farmer’s Almanac, as well.

The Autumn Equinox Festival is a few weeks later than the actual equinox, so maybe it wouldbe OK if we renamed some our other events to make us sound more sophisticated.

How about changing the name of the early December Hometown Christmas Parade to the Winter Solstice Christmas Parade. It sounds a lot more fancy than “hometown,” and all of a sudden we believe in science again.

– Mike Barnhardt