Born in December

• SagittariusThe Archer
• CapricornThe Sea-Goat

A December birthday begins as Sagittarius. Between 1920 and 2026 the sun moved into Capricorn, at the December solstice, on the 21st of December in 40 years (the first in 1940) and the 22nd in 67, in universal time. A birthday on 21 December or 22 December is therefore Sagittarius or Capricorn depending on the year, and in the year of a crossing on the hour; the page for each of those dates gives the sign and the moment of the crossing for every year.

Every other date in December had one sign all day in every one of those years: Sagittarius up to the 20th and Capricorn from the 23rd. Those are dates in universal time, though, and a date begins earlier east of Greenwich and later to the west of it, so in some years the 20th and 23rd were also the local date of a crossing somewhere far enough away; their pages list the years.

In the astrological tradition Sagittarius is a fire sign and a mutable one, ruled by Jupiter. Printed tables give it as 22 November – 21 December; between 1920 and 2026 the sun entered it on the 21st, 22nd or 23rd of November and left it on the 21st or 22nd of December.

In the astrological tradition Capricorn is an earth sign and a cardinal one, ruled by Saturn. Printed tables give it as 22 December – 19 January; between 1920 and 2026 the sun entered it on the 21st or 22nd of December and left it on the 19th, 20th or 21st of January.

December is the only month whose list has been changed twice, and of the three stones on it today only turquoise was there at the start: the 1912 list gave turquoise with lapis lazuli as its alternate, lapis was later dropped for zircon, and tanzanite was added after that. Turquoise, a phosphate of copper and aluminium, is one of the oldest gems in use, and pieces buried in ancient Egyptian tombs are among the oldest jewellery known. Zircon is a natural mineral, zirconium silicate, and it is often confused with cubic zirconia, the synthetic diamond substitute, which GIA calls an unfair confusion: the two share the element zirconium and little else. Tanzanite is a violet-blue zoisite mined commercially in only one place on earth, the Merelani Hills near Mount Kilimanjaro, and its name, after the country, dates from 1968, when Tiffany & Co. began selling it.

The 1912 list is the one the National Association of Jewelers adopted at Kansas City that August, as G. F. Kunz printed it in The Curious Lore of Precious Stones (1913), with a birth-stone for each month and an alternate for some; today's list is the one GIA publishes. The two lists compared →

The paperwhite narcissus and holly are December's flowers. The paperwhite is a small white narcissus from the western Mediterranean that needs no winter cold before it flowers, which is why its bulbs are sold to be grown in a bowl of pebbles indoors and brought into bloom for Christmas. Holly is a plant of separate sexes: only the female bears berries, so a holly without them is not failing but male, and the leaves high on the tree, out of reach of browsing animals, are often smooth-edged. The berries are poisonous to people and to pets.

The meanings usually given today are a summary of the birth-flower lists printed now. The older ones are quoted from the dictionary named, under the heading it prints them. Birth flowers and the language of flowers →