SAD - lighting the way

During the winter months more and more multi-colored lights and bright, festive decorations are splashed across houses and yards everywhere. Long ago, in more earthy times, people celebrated the solstice because it was the rebirth of the sun, when days began to lengthen and light began to return. As our ancient ancestors probably realized, their celebrations helped to keep spirits up when times were dark and cold, just as our modern holiday light displays function as a way to ward off the winter blues.
However, not everybody can shake the sadness that comes at this time of year, usually because they are suffering from a type of clinical depression called Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD). When a person has SAD, he or she regularly experiences depression in the winter months that then subsides in the spring and summer months. Although first identified around 1845, this mood disorder was not officially classified until 1984 when psychiatrist Norman E. Rosenthal, M.D., began to study cases of depression that seemed to occur during the winter only. After an article was published in The Washington Post about his research, Rosenthal received a nationwide response from thousands of people who experienced the same symptoms he had observed in his patients.  After further research he compiled his studies in Winter Blues: Seasonal Affective Disorder: What It Is and How to Overcome It, which he recently revised, updated, and re released in October 1998.
The symptoms of Seasonal Affective Disorder appear in the winter months and leave with the return of longer days of sunlight, in the spring. They include body aches and pains, changes in energy level, sleep/wake patterns, and appetite, avoidance of social situations, reduction in the quality of sleep, drop in energy level, weight gain, irritability, inability to complete tasks, decreased creativity, and suicidal thoughts.
I suffer from SAD. I have since I lived in the Alaska.  The four years I lived there in the winter I would have only 2 hours of light a day.  Even now during January and part of February I find  myself playing mind games of why I don't want to go to church, clubs, meetings, and social events.  I really have just learned to plow on and not listen to my thoughts. I just get listless.

I find that skiing, snow shoeing, and plowing my yard a big help.  But even during those activities my face is the only thing that is exposed to the light.  Well only two more weeks and my spirits will start to soar again.