In a poem, we sometimes read on Christmas Eve, Carl Sandburg asks

Shall we look up now at stars in Winter

And call them always sweeter friends

Because this story of a Mother and a Child

Never is told with the stars left out?

Many years, especially as a new minister, at the approach of the Winter Solstice, as the days grew shorter still, the nights longer, and we waited, waited, waited, for the earth’s angle in relationship to the sun to shift, I would say, light-heartedly yet seriously, that Arlo Guthrie is right: "you can’t have a light without a dark to stick it in."