This morning at 0030 hrs eastern standard time (much clearer than 12:30 a.m., right?) the winter solstice occurred. What does that mean? Not much. Christmas is coming, day length will stop decreasing, and sunrise and sunset will start moving north again:
Other than that, it’s pretty much business as usual.
One of the things you might notice from the diagram is that even in summer, when the sun’s apparent path in the horizon starts out north of due east and winds up north of due west, the sun at noon is never north of the zenith point (assuming you’re north of the tropics). That’s because the earth’s axis of rotation is tilted; at noon the sun is ALWAYS about 23.5° south of its starting and ending points. It can’t do anything else. The earth’s axis doesn’t move, at least not on appreciable time scales. (The earth’s axis actually wobbles over the course of about 26,000 years, which is responsible for the precession of the equinoxes, but that’s a different story.)