We turned every light off at 4:47 p.m. — sundown, on the dot — and Cleo asked if the wifi counted as light, which is the kind of question I want her asking on the longest night of the year.
Solstice rules in our house are simple. From sundown to sunup, no overhead bulbs, no screens, no anything that hums. The body needs thirteen uninterrupted hours of true dark once a year to reset what a man on a Telegram channel my husband forwards me without comment calls “the mitochondrial clock.” You don’t get that in February. You don’t get it in October. You get it tonight, or you wait til 2026.
I am told this sounds intense. It is not intense. It is one night. The Norwegians have been doing it for ten thousand years. Wyatt had a friend over and I gave them a bowl of soaked almonds and a beeswax taper and they were thrilled, eventually.
Across the cul-de-sac, Marlene has put up six hundred LED icicles and a projector that throws moving snowflakes onto her siding. I love Marlene. I love her husband Greg, who shimmies up the ladder every November and overshoots by about four hundred bulbs every year. But cheap LEDs flicker — they pulse at a frequency the human eye can’t quite see and the human nervous system absolutely can. There is a Facebook group called PWM and Our Children that has posted side-by-side pulse oximeter readings I will not link here because I respect your evening, but Marlene’s boy Brody had a nosebleed at the tree lighting last Thursday and I’m not saying.
My sister-in-law Tara works the front desk at a pediatric office in Hendersonville and is basically a nurse. She told me cortisol stays elevated for forty-seven minutes after exposure to any blinking light source brighter than the moon, which is a sentence I think about constantly during December. The moon tonight is a waning crescent. The moon tonight is doing its job. Marlene’s inflatable reindeer is doing somebody else’s job.
I am not anti-light. Fire is good. Fire is, technically, a mineral process — it’s just oxidation, which is the same thing rust does, and nobody is afraid of rust. Beeswax is a food. The tapers on my mantle right now are rendered in cast iron by a woman named Honey-Anne in Marshall and they smell like absolutely nothing, because they are not supposed to smell like anything. Cinnamon-scented candles are made with cassia oil and a chemical called coumarin that the European Union banned in chewing gum. We are burning it in our living rooms. Anyway.
Cleo asked at 6:15 if Santa could still see us with the lights off and I said Santa is the one being who can. She accepted this. She is four. She also asked if the solstice is when the sun dies and I said no, sweetie, the sun is just resting, and she said “like Pop-Pop,” and I said yes, baby, like Pop-Pop, and we both moved on.
We made a list — by candlelight, which is the only correct way to make a list — of one thing each of us is going to release with the dark. Cleo is releasing the idea that the cat wants to be held. Wyatt is releasing fluoride, which he picked himself; I did not lead him there. My husband is releasing his fantasy football league, which he has been losing since September. I am releasing the version of me that used to buy almond milk in a Tetra Pak.
At about 8:40 Marlene came over with a tray of cookies that I think had Crisco in them and she stood in our doorway, lit only by my taper, and said “it’s so dark in here, is everything okay,” and I said yes Marlene, yes, this is the whole point. She left the cookies. I will compost them in the morning, lovingly.
The sun comes back tomorrow. It comes back about a minute more, technically, which Tara says is enough to kick the pineal gland back into rhythm if you’re outside barefoot for the first hour of it. I will be. Cleo will be in her muck boots, which are barefoot-adjacent. The grass is frozen. The mitochondria don’t care.
Greg’s projector is still going. It will still be going at sunup. Some people are not ready for the dark.