The winter solstice means different things to different people. For me, feeling light-deprived in late autumn, the winter solstice is an important milepost, a bottoming out.

I'm always initially ambivalent as autumn begins to wind down. On the one hand, with each passing day we are robbed of more and more daylight. On the other hand, I know that, once the winter solstice arrives, we turn the corner. On December 21, we will have reached the shortest day of 2008, and from then on we can only gain daylight -- imperceptibly, to be sure, but also inexorably.

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