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KANGIQTUGAAPIK/CLYDE RIVER
This week - Jan. 21 - to be precise, sunlight will break the horizon at 10:39 a.m. heralding the end of two months of 24-hour darkness and the start of a variety of festivities at Quluaq school in Clyde river.

Grade One substitute teacher Trena Hainnu, left, shows of a brightly decorated classroom door in anticipation of the school's Sun Day with student support assistant Judy Joanas. - photo courtesy of Katharine Bartlett

"Everything is really upbeat on that day," said principal Graham Field. "If somebody sees the sun first, they will come to me and say the sun is up and I'll go to on PA system and you hear the hoopla all over the school."

The school's annual Sun Day event, held last Friday, featured scores of activities. Students took part in contests, made sun hats and sunglasses, raced racing carts, shot target and played baseball and volleyball. The students also listened to elders tell stories, and created sun-related art from tissue paper. They brightened the halls of the school with artwork, decked classroom doors with suns and donned their sunniest summer wardrobe.

"To see the kids go around with homemade sunglasses and Bermuda shorts, it's really something," said Field, who honours the return of the sun in his own way, seal hunting on the floe edge a week earlier. "The sun is high in the sky (out on the ice) as opposed to here in the community where there are a lot of mountains, "he said. "It's a very warm feeling. Even though the temperature is -28 or -30 you still feel very warm because of that sunshine. It's a very pleasurable thing for me."

The sun last rose in the hamlet Nov. 21. Now, each day grows about seven minutes longer until May 13 when Clyde River will have 24-hour sunlight – the bright side to 24-hour darkness.

Clyde River is the first Baffin community to experience the return of the sun. Pangnirtung, which is slightly below the Arctic Circle, does not experience 24-hour darkness, nor does Qikiqtarjuaq, which is slightly above. According to Environment Canada, due to the refraction of light, the limits of 24-hour sunlight and 24-hour darkness extend approximately 50 nautical miles north and south of the Arctic Circle.

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