It’s Time to Change Your Clocks Again, Here’s Why We Do It

I love fall in New York, but the one thing I don't like is that there is so much darkness.  When I wake up, it's dark.  When I get out of work, it's dark.  If I had a magic wand, I would keep all of the amazing things about fall, but we would have summer sunlight.  The good news is that this weekend, on Sunday, November 7, 2021, at 2 am, we will "fall" back.  Changing our clocks will give us more sunlight in the mornings as we are getting ready for work and the kids are heading to school. You'll need to set all of your clocks back an hour - other than your smart devices, which usually do it automatically.  But why?  Why is daylight saving time even a thing?

Arizona, Hawaii, American Samoa, Guam, The Northern Mariana Island, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands do not observe daylight saving time.

According to The Old Farmer's Almanac, Daylight Saving Time is all about giving us more light,

Daylight Saving Time is the practice of moving the clocks forward one hour from Standard Time during the summer months and changing them back again in the fall. The general idea is that this allows us all to make better use of natural daylight: moving the clocks forward one hour in the spring grants us more daylight during summer evenings, while moving clocks back one hour in the fall grants us more daylight during winter mornings.

Daylight Saving Time happens annually. It starts at 2 am on the second Sunday in March and ends at 2 am on the first Sunday in November.

The concept was created by William Willet of England,

 In “The Waste of Daylight,” the manifesto of his personal light-saving campaign, Willet wrote, “Everyone appreciates the long, light evenings. Everyone laments their shrinkage as the days grow shorter; and nearly everyone has given utterance to a regret that the nearly clear, bright light of an early morning during Spring and Summer months is so seldom seen or used… . That so many as 210 hours of daylight are, to all intents and purposes, wasted every year is a defect in our civilization. Let England recognise and remedy it.”

So don't forget to set your clocks back this Sunday and don't waste your daylight!

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