The phrase “dark winter,” spoken by an American politician who foregrounds the importance of his religious faith, has a specifically Christian resonance, particularly as we approach the 25th of December. Dark winters are harnessed, like a logical inevitability, to the idea of rebirth or renewal. This may be illusory — sometimes misery just compounds — but it is deeply baked into how the Western world conceives of the season. The master of this trope, Charles Dickens, left volumes of stories — his Christmas novels and tales, appearing annually in the magazines he edited — in which he used deeply troubling, even sadistic narratives of violence and loss to set up often unconvincing scenes of redemption. For Dickens, Christmas is something like an extended Halloween shackled to a quick Easter.