Today is the shortest day of the year. It’s been coming for weeks, as anyone with even minimal observational skills would have noticed. The sun is low on the horizon, and its anemic rays barely seem to warm the tips of the leaves before the sun slips away again, leaving us in darkness. A darkness which seems to linger longer each morning, and descend sooner in the afternoons.

I happen to love winter. I think it’s a great season, and I’m excited that today marks the first day of winter. But, this year, for the first time, I am also looking forward to the lengthening of the days, to the few seconds of daylight which will be gained every day until summer reaches its zenith in six months, sun blazing in a brassy sky.

It might be the grinding cold we’ve been experiencing for the last few days. It’s not the same kind of cold you get on the Midwest or the East Coast, but the problem is that we are woefully unprepared for it. My poorly insulated house with the holes in the floor just is not equipped for the cold. The wind whistles in through the cracks and frost forms on the bathroom floor, even with the heater on, and the air never seems to become fully warm. I shuffle around in sweaters and thick socks and I long for Vermont, where it might be 30 degrees colder out, but at least the buildings are warm and well built.

Maybe it’s that I feel like it’s the middle of the night at six o’clock, when I peer out into the darkness and see nothing at all. Or that, when I get up at 5:30, it’s pitch black out, and cold.

Many cultures have superstitions surrounding the solstice, such as the idea that people need to stay up all night to watch the sunrise, to make sure that the sun hasn’t been stolen away. I’ve noticed that extreme northern climes tend to have correspondingly more complex myths and legends and rituals for the winter solstice, perhaps because people hungered for the sun so, and knew that it couldn’t be replaced with roaring fires and yule logs, wreaths of holly and pine boughs in the hallways. The sun is a unique, intrinsic entity, and I miss it intensely.

There’s a reason we fill winter with festivals of lights and food and family in so many cultures: it’s because our fear of the dark drives us to be among others, to warm our houses with complicated cookery, to set all the lights ablaze so that we cannot see the wolf at the doorstep.

I’ve always thought it’s odd that the Solstice officially marks the start of winter, when it feels like we are in the depths of winter already. I note that I expressed many of these same sentiments on the Solstice last year, the longing for sunshine and astonishment that so many cultures have made such a big production about the Solstice. And I wonder why it is that I always feel obliged to say something for the Winter Solstice, but nary a peep in the Summer, or on either of the equinoxes. Maybe it’s because the Winter feels the most mystical, to me. Or maybe it’s because the darkness is so close and immediate in the Winter, and so distant on the lazy days of June.