Consider the merchants, who in 1939 persuaded President Roosevelt to move Thanksgiving to an earlier Thursday in order to lengthen the Christmas shopping season. For them, the income they realize in December either makes or breaks their businesses. The end of the year is almost upon them — “...a time,” as Ebenezer Scrooge says, “for balancing your books and having every item in ‘em through a round dozen of months presented dead against you” — and its accounting will reveal either red or black in their ledgers. For them, it can be an anxious time of year. I feel especially for the owners of small local businesses, whose hearts must ache when they drive past the vast, clogged parking lots of franchisees and big box stores. They know what very few people seem to know anymore: that you get what you pay for. I pray for them that they can hang on until their fellow citizens figure that out and begin to spend again their money where they earn it.

Then there are the meteorological phenomena of the month. The darkness shuts down ever earlier and stays ever later through the first three weeks of December, but the morning star is never brighter. For some reason, the shortest day of the year is also the first official day of winter, even though from then on the sun will be returning. The cold deepens for five or six weeks after the winter solstice, and February 2, known as both Groundhog Day and Candlemas, is the real middle of winter, when traditionally we should have half our wood still in the shed and half our hay still in the barn. Old-time loggers, who spent the winter in camps far from home, usually failed to trim their toenails and as a result quickly wore big holes in the toes of their wool socks. If they weren’t able to darn them, or didn’t feel like it, they solved the problem by then putting on their socks upside down, shoving their feet through the holes and folding the former ankle back in a flap. This was known as “Tupper Lakein’ your socks.” If you had to do it by the end of December, you were in for a long, hard winter.

The extended periods of darkness trigger increase activity in our pineal gland, which pumps out melatonin, encouraging our bodies to eat, sleep, and get sad. Sufferers from seasonal affective disorder (whose acronym, appropriately, is SAD) tend to teeter on the verge of depression in December. They can get some relief from special-spectrum lamps. In European countries and Russia, north of the Arctic Circle, where the darkness is constant and unrelieved for weeks or even months, kids in school (the ones who manage to get there) beat the blues with a daily communal hot tub surrounded by bright full-spectrum lights. Another popular way to fight the darkness and inactivity is, unfortunately, through increased alcohol consumption. Not coincidentally are alcoholism and suicide common causes of far northern winter deaths.

For many other people, however, a snowy winter is cause for hyperactivity. Out come snowshoes and cross-country skis; the woods are crisscrossed with the tracks of wandering enthusiasts; and the interstates are clogged with cars with out-of-state license plates on their bumpers and Thule boxes on their roofs, tooling at high speeds toward ski resorts, whose owners are never jollier than with several feet of natural snow. Maple sugar makers, their fingers crossed that it’ll last, look forward to a sugar season that’ll make sense and be on schedule for a change.

But most of all, December is a time for celebrations of light burning in darkness. The first is Hanukkah, the Jewish festival that assumes great importance primarily because of that juxtaposition. It commemorates the rededication of the Temple in Jerusalem during the Maccabean Revolt of 165 BC, when the temple candles miraculously burned for eight days on one day’s ration of oil. On December 13th the Swedes celebrate the feast of St. Lucia (whose very name means “light”). Her legend has many versions, but most of them have her marching sacrificially through the darkness with a crown of candles on her head. The girl chosen to do this in the annual procession is watched over very carefully by her mother. Then comes Christmas, whose date has nothing to do with the actual birthday of Christ. It was placed in mid-December in order to piggyback on the Roman feast of Saturnalia, a midwinter fertility rite. Its theme, of course, is that of a light burning in darkness, “which comprehended it not” — of hope in a seemingly hopeless time. And finally there is Kwanzaa, a fairly recent phenomenon in the United States. The name is from the Swahili, meaning “first fruits.” Non-religious and covering six days starting on Boxing Day (United Kingdom, December 26), it celebrates African-American culture.

For me, December is a busy time, of preoccupation and more activity than there’s time for. It starts with eight days of rehearsals and performances of winter tales to audiences sipping warm cider and nibbling Christmas cookies in a darkened theater in Burlington. Then the performances of Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” for which I dig out my tux and discover whether my body has changed shape during the past twelve months. And finally, at the new year, First Night celebrations across northern Vermont. They’re all exciting, and it’s always an unalloyed pleasure to see so many smiling faces shining in candlelight or footlights. But it’s the message that’s important.

I leave the sermons to the clerics. Instead, I let Charles Dickens speak to the spirit of dark December: “...when men and women seem...to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as...fellow passengers...” It’s a reminder that the joys of the season do not come to everyone, and that it’s up to us to share them liberally, in any way we can.