The sun is setting outside my window. It’s not even 4:30, and its pale orange glow is slipping below a line of gray clouds, beneath the bare trees and into the horizon beyond Fishing Creek.

The shadows are thick at my desk, hiding my dog, asleep on the daybed, the words on the pages of my notebook and the dregs of a forgotten cup of tea.

Winter solstice 2025 arrives at 10:03 a.m. Sunday, the moment when this wobbly old Earth shifts Annapolis and me to our farthest point from the sun.

This time of year, the hours without light go on so very long. The night rolls on through a world too often filled with violence and hate.

Australia will mark the summer solstice at 2:02 a.m. Monday.

While their days are longest now, it’s been dark there for a week.

Father-and-son gunmen killed 16 people in a mass shooting last weekend at a Hanukkah celebration in Sydney, sending another 42 to the hospital.

Casualties included a 10-year-old boy and a rabbi. A Jewish couple died and a Muslim immigrant from Syria was wounded trying to stop the attack.

The elder gunman, 50, is among the dead. His 24-year-old son is among the living.

President Donald Trump, the king of American darkness, found time to blame U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar for the attack, accusing the naturalized Somali immigrant and critic of Israeli leaders of antisemitism.

It’s dark in Providence, Rhode Island, too.

At 4 p.m. Saturday, 23 hours before the shooting on Bondi Beach, a gunman walked into the physics and engineering building at Brown University and opened fire with a 9 mm pistol.

Two people were killed, eight more were injured and the gunman escaped.

The president posted false information on Truth Social about the shooting, saying a suspect was in custody. Twenty minutes later, he reversed himself and blamed the police.

Somehow, the killer managed to evade security cameras and murder a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor at his home Tuesday.

Police said Thursday that the man killed himself in a New Hampshire storage unit. He was a Portuguese immigrant who came to America in 2017 to study physics at Brown.

Two of the victims were immigrants, too, but the president’s hate ignored that. His administration used the tragedy to shut down the visa program that let the gunman in as a legal resident.

“This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said on X.

The distant sun rose just a little before 7 in Los Angeles on the morning after the classroom violence in Rhode Island.

Police suspect that filmmaker-actor Rob Reiner and his wife, photographer Michele Singer Reiner, were dead by then, hours after the carnage in Rhode Island and hours before the mayhem on Bondi Beach.

Police charged the couple’s 32-year-old son, Nick Reiner, with stabbing them in their home. He has a history of substance abuse, mental health problems and a difficult family relationship.

Trump, never at a loss when it comes to exploiting others pain, said Reiner died because he was a critic of his presidency.

“He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump,” he wrote on Truth Social.

Nine hours of sunlight is all we get this time of year.

In a few minutes, my neighbor’s house down the street will light up with 40-odd man-hours of holiday displays. They’ll twinkle for a time, and then, with the click of a hidden timer, switch off for the night.

I’ve long ago given up climbing to the top of my roof to hang Christmas lights. I point a couple of laser projectors up into the thinnest branches of our 11 sweetgum trees.

Pinpricks of light move across them in the dark, almost as if the sky full of stars has come down just a little closer.

Winter begins with the northern solstice, a time when we have to find our own sources of illumination.

In Annapolis, Democrats elected a daughter of the Dominican Republic as speaker of the House of Delegates.

Joseline Peña-Melnyk came to America as a child with her parents, then became a citizen, a lawyer and a state delegate.

Her party chose her as the president’s campaign to remove 1 million immigrants from the country rumbles forward, with camo-uniformed ICE agents rounding people up, sending them to detention camps and then deporting them.

Peña-Melnyk’s selection wasn’t even a response to this gloom.

Her competitors quickly dropped out, acknowledging that her leadership on every tough issue to come before state lawmakers earned her the role.

The few times I’ve met Peña-Melnyk, she seems smart, kind and capable.

The cruelty class and its king in Washington want to remove all Somalis from the U.S. because organized immigrant criminals in Michigan defrauded a COVID relief program out of billions.

“They contribute nothing. I don’t want them in our country,” Trump told reporters. “Their country is no good for a reason. Your country stinks and we don’t want them in our country.”

With his white nationalist view of immigrants, you have to wonder what the president would think about the success of an Afro-Latina woman 45 miles from the White House.

As the sun outside my window slips below the horizon, the sky turns from December blue and gray to rose and pink.

The colors are unique to this month, maybe even to Fishing Creek, a little tributary of the Chesapeake Bay just outside of Annapolis.

There’s a reason we light our nighttime hours, sing and dance around the winter solstice. Yes, it’s Christmas. Yes, it’s Hanukkah. It’s Kwanzaa, Dongzhi and Yalda, too.

But it’s really to ward off the dark, the bad things that lurk outside our homes and our lives. The lights remind of us of the good even when we can’t see it.

Like the December sunset outside my window, it’s a sign that eventually, even when it is darkest, the light will return.

Happy solstice. Happy New Year.