The Winter Solstice represents a kind of victory against darkness that happens every year. In my younger days when I took everything with a kind of comic seriousness, I took the dying of the light that happened every Fall personally. Something in me died with the dying of the light every afternoon. On an overcast Wintry day in the suburbs long after the leaves' brilliant colours had been drained out of the landscape, there was a moment when the grey sky turned a deep slate colour right before the yellow street lamps came on to illuminate the slushy streets, where all hope seemed gone. Now, though, I appreciate the mutability of the Northern hemisphere's seasons and cycles and make a point of trying to see the under  side of each moment waiting its turn: the invisible buds deep within the frozen branches, the dormant reds and oranges inside green leaves or a moonlit starry night there waiting behind fluffy white clouds and a blue sky.