Happy Winter Solstice! At Last, We've Made It To 'The Shortest Day'

Author Susan Cooper knows what it is to be scared of the dark. As a child growing up in England during World War II, she remembers long, dark nights, with Nazi bombers flying overhead.

"We would be sitting in a raid shelter underneath the back lawn with Mum reading books to us by the light of a candle," she recalls. "When the bombs came closer, the candle would shake."

Now, nearly a lifetime later, Cooper's book The Shortest Day, is a celebration of light gradually returning after the winter solstice. Saturday, Dec. 21, is the shortest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere.

"I've spent my life writing about the light and the dark," Cooper says. And this latest book is "a family celebration of the light coming back after the dark threatens to take over the world."