For the roughly 90 percent of us who live in the Northern Hemisphere, the winter solstice of 2017 is coming soon (at 11:28 a.m. E.S.T. on Thursday, to be precise). And if it wasn’t so dark out, you’d see how happy I am that the year’s longest night is sweeping down over the northern half of our planet, as naturally as the lid of a closing eye.

Full disclosure: I’ve always loved the dark. My mother often recalled that as a small child I would sometimes grumble, “I don’t want the sun to shine, I want the moon to shine.” I decided to become an airline pilot in part because I believed that aviators might enjoy a particularly pure experience of night. The glow of the Christmas rituals I still love best — lights, candles, hearths — would mean little to me without the shadows that embower them.

To this dark but cozy and star-spangled corner of the calendar, I welcome like-minded pilots and air travelers; astronomers, of course; and any fans of “The Simpsons” who secretly cheered when Mr. Burns (“I call this enemy … the sun!”) tried to block out the light from everyone’s favorite ball of plasma. But whatever your feelings about the longest night, the winter solstice — transcendent, yet precise; celestial, but very local — is worth pausing to savor.

Indeed, while I hope to spend every Christmas at home by the fire, this is also my favorite time of year to fly. Night flights are often smoother, and they are almost always more sublime. Raise your window blind and you may be the only person to ever see how the moonlight falls on an ephemeral, rolling Narnia of cloud, while on a clear evening a city far below you may look exactly as we might most beautifully imagine it — as a shorthand for civilization, written in light on the pages of a darkened Earth.