In spite of the Congressional inertia that seems to refuse even to discuss the dubious wisdom of changing our clocks twice a year, we begin and end our days in the dark. Sitting at our desk by a window in December, we watch the sky darken well before quitting time. In the morning, unless we know exactly where our socks and smalls are, we need to turn on the lamp beside the bed to find them. The night sky in winter, except for a myriad of stars, is inky black, while in summer, a faint tinge of light lingers all night, especially in the north. If I were a psychiatrist, I’d schedule all my cases of depression for appointments right around midday. It’d save on tissues.

This sounds a lot like complaining, which, after almost ninety years, I should hope I’d have gotten over by now. After all, lots of other people have it worse (if you want to call it that) than we do. My friends Larry and Helen Whittaker in Kugluktuk, Nunavut, just north of the Arctic Circle, are currently basking in the sun’s rays from a few minutes after noon till a few minutes before one. In a couple of weeks they’ll be able safely to put away their Ray-Bans, because for a few weeks they’ll have no sun at all. Their world will be in a perpetual gloom. I presume they won’t.

Our ancestors, too, had it much harder than we. Evenings, they either went to bed with the chickens, as the old saying goes, sat in the dark, or burned precious coal oil (kerosene) in their lamps. A line in an old song called “Pickin’ Time” celebrates the influx of cash when the cotton crop has been hauled to the gin and sold: “We’ll stay up late come pickin’ time.”

Not too long ago the first one of the family to get up in the morning went to start up the wood stove, hoping that it retained enough hot coals to ignite kindling without a match. During my childhood the wood stove had become the coal furnace, which like the stove took a while (it was before forced-air furnaces) to heat up the house. On cold mornings I came into the kitchen to find my mother backed up to the natural gas oven, its door open, with her skirt lifted in back to catch the warm blast. “Five minutes at 300 degrees,” was her usual recipe.

It certainly comes as no surprise to any of us that our traditional midwinter festivals, both religious and secular, universally focus on light shining in darkness. From Hanukkah to Saturnalia to Yule to Christmas to Kwanzaa, they all celebrate (hopefully, if you listen carefully) the expectation of the return of the sun. Before the days of a scientific explanation of the rotation of the seasons, the rising from the dead of winter seemed dependent upon the favor of supernatural forces and beings beyond our understanding. Imagine the fear that could be evoked by a proclamation from your local shaman or druid that the gods were unhappy with you.

So we soldier on toward the light – as if we had a choice. I’m currently reading daily posts from my younger daughter, who with her husband and some friends is enjoying the tropical breezes of Hawaii, just a few degrees south of the Tropic of Cancer, officially in the tropics. Idyllic, of course; but I did notice today that the place is so crowded you have to have a timed reservation to climb Diamond Head before sunrise. I don’t think you need much of a reservation to climb Camels Hump any time of day, whatever the season of the year.

There’s other good news, too. The mosquitoes and black flies are in hibernation, or whatever they do in winter. The Canada geese that drive greenskeepers nuts in July are paddling around far south of us. The bears, in spite of climate change, finally have gone to bed, so we can again stock our bird feeders without fear of vandalism. The astronauts currently stuck in earth orbit have only a couple of months to go till they can come home. The Beast of Baghdad has fled abjectly to Russia. Taylor Swift is no longer the center of attention at Chiefs’ games. And in just about two weeks the axis of the earth’s rotation will again begin to tilt slowly toward the sun.