I swear that I can already start to feel the difference even in the very first days following the winter solstice -- a slow, steady, increase in the earth's illumination -- but this morning when I stepped outside my house to take the kids to school, it was obvious:  the northern hemisphere is tilting increasingly sunward... And my heart is growing increasingly warm in the glow.

This is something that I've come to love about Dutch winters (which are, generally, absolutely nothing to get excited about in any possible way).  Because of Amsterdam's latitude -- 52°22'22" North of the Equator -- the difference between the hours of daylight in the summer and the hours of daylight in the winter are extreme.  At the darkest times of the year, the sun doesn't come up until about nine o'clock in the morning, and it's already setting again by four o'clock in the afternoon... But in the brightest days of midsummer, the sun will rise around five-thirty in the morning and the last traces of dusk will linger in the evening sky until eleven o'clock or so... Thus, because there's so much ground to cover between these two extremes, the transition from summer to winter and back again to summer can be drastic and obvious.

Again, I really think that I can notice the difference, ever so subtly stretching the hours of daylight, by Christmastime (just a few days after the winter solstice).  The transformation is gradual at first, just slightly, slightly, softly, and slowly swelling hours of sunlight.  But (I don't know if there's any scientific proof of this) by the end of January and throughout February and March, it feels like we're grabbing great fistfuls of sunlight every day.  It's like Cookie Monster, getting a taste of something that he likes -- playing it all cool and casual in the beginning, but then somehow or another he ends up in a mad feeding frenzy.  In the latter parts of February and the early parts of March, especially, it feels like we're pulling in an extra ten or fifteen minutes of sunlight per day!  Again, I can't really say that there's any scientific proof of this bell-curve theory of sunlight's return to Amsterdam -- but in any event, the psychological effect cannot be denied.

All I know for sure is that at the beginning of this week, I was taking my kids to school in the dark.  And today, I took my kids to school -- at the same time, following the same routine as always, stepping out the door around 8:15 in the morning -- in the glorious dawn of a new day...