What makes this chunk of the calendar so confusing is the confluence of so many yin and yang features. The shortest day of the year – and how we miss the sunlight! –is just about a week away; yet the almanac shows sunset just beginning to get later. It’s only a handful of seconds a week to begin with, but the days are on their way of reading the day’s mail on the back porch in late afternoon sunlight. The winter solstice brings us earlier sunrises, too, as the sun begins to creep north again, and I put bits of tape on the kitchen floor to mark the edge of an east window’s light as it creeps south.

The coldest weather of the winter, though not any more the bugbear it once was, invariably follows the shortest day of the year by about four to six weeks. So the meteorological middle of winter falls just about Groundhog Day (or Candlemas, if you’re so inclined). About that time, daylight grows faster. In the winter of 1985, right around Valentine’s Day, my buddy Dudley and I skied the multiday Iditaski Marathon over the Iditarod Trail, and each morning we could see the sun rise from the horizon a few minutes earlier. But it was still cool during our all-night travels – 26º below the last night. So the cheer-inducing sunlight accompanies the chill-inducing frost. That can be depressing for some folks.

Then, of course, there’s Christmas. which could hardly be a more confusing holiday than it is. Is it a celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ, or a festive season of gift-giving and feasts and family gatherings, or a Norse/Old German fist-shaking at the darkness with a Yule log blazing and the fist holding a horn full of gløgg (red wine, aquavit, cloves, cinnamon, cardamom, ginger, sugar, raisins, and almonds) guaranteed to make you hope the sun won’t rise next morning?

There’s utterly no evidence that Christ was born in December – to the contrary, actually – but what better metaphor during the darkest time of year than one of light coming into a benighted world? Just after the winter solstice is the perfect time to suggest hope for the future. Never mind that the season is, or was, already cluttered with festivals – Saturnalia, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Yule. It’s the perfect time, when people are inclined to religious roistering against the night, to introduce this “greatest story ever told.” Saint Patrick did the same thing centuries later, wandering about Ireland converting druids and pagans by coopting their festivals and holy places. Visiting rural Ireland, you come across pools of water – springs – that once were sacred to pagans, now festooned with crucifixes, rosary beads, and even crutches.

Judging by the many comments on social media, there runs abroad in the United States a nostalgia for an “old-fashioned Christmas.” It doesn’t seem to call so much for eschewing Black Friday behavior as for a return to the days of lighted trees, presents, and caroling through the neighborhood. Almost invariably, the writer speaks of, and deplores, the neutral term, “Happy Holidays!” as a supposed suppression of the observance of “Christmas.” You read, “Merry Christmas! Repost if you’re not afraid!”

This is but a tiny fraction of the general unease among white American traditionalists that the demographic ground beneath their feet is shifting. There’s even an expression of a feeling of persecution: “We can’t even call it a Christmas tree anymore!” That’s baloney, of course, but it does demonstrste how deep the divisions among us have grown. I can remember being amused about seventy years ago by the southern accents of costumed Texas kids stiffly portraying the birth of “Crast.” And I recall ducking into doorways in Piedras Negras on Christmas Eve when dozens of Mexican revelers emptied their pistoles into the midnight air. I kept thinking, “All those bullets’ve gotta come down around here somewhere.” In neither case would I have suggested those weren’t “real” ways to celebrate Christmas. It was none of my business.

What is my business is to keep ever in mind the words of Scrooge’s nephew – “the one time of year that men and women by mutual consent seem freely to open their shut-up hearts” – to hail cheerfully each day the returning sun (on the odd occasions I actually can see it); to remember warmly my life partner, for whom Christmas and Easter were magical; to affirm unity with my friends celebrating Hanukkah or Kwanzaa; to try to be what a Buddhist monk described to me as an ideal person: one with light coming out.