Winter Waning Moon of Long Nights -13 (low -25)
Well, we did hit -25 again, this time at 6:49 a.m. The sun seems like an exercise in futility, but even with the high albedo of 100% snow cover, we still get solar gain.
Try to imagine what we’d be like here without the sun. That’s the reason all those folks spend so much time celebrating 
the daylight side of the Winter Solstice. If the sun kept disappearing for longer and longer chunks of time, and the temperature grew more and more severe, then, if you had little understanding of astronomy and believed the sun’s return depended on the favor of this god or that, you could have come into the time of winter solstice hoping, but not being sure, that the sun would return.
Think how happy you would be with even this weak soup of solar particles. At least there is light, and, thank Brigit or Apollo or whoever, it seems like there is more light.
More cold. More often.