Tick-Tocking

We’ve done it twice a year for most of our lives, depending on our age and where we live: the switch to Daylight Saving Time and back again. We’ve probably forgotten the reasons, it’s just one of those things we do because we always have. While that itself is the most enduring reason, it’s no longer good enough for me. I’m not going to join the debate about school kids getting up in the dark or businesses staying open later. 

First of all, Daylight Saving Time is a misnomer. Whether you set clocks forward or back, you have exactly the same amount of daylight available for that part of the season. It’s just a question of how it’s spent. And in the dead of winter, kids will still get up in the dark in temperate latitudes and their parents will likely still drive home in it. Full-on daylight may cover only about a third of the 24 hours we allow in a day. I think we just have to pick one time standard and be done with it.

All this clock-fiddling used to be a question of whether folks arrived at church too early on the first Sunday or missed the service altogether. But there is enough data to show that there are more traffic accidents with the instant time shifts in the spring and fall. There’s something internally disturbing about the suddenness of it, rather than letting this aspect of seasons change naturally. 

There seems to be consensus building in the United States around making what we call Daylight Saving a year-round thing. I like that idea. We get our lovely long evenings in summer, and on Standard Time, the bird who wakes me up at 4:45 a.m. in late June would be doing so at 3:45 a.m. We all have our reasons. But whatever happens, I’ll get used to it. In Alaska, people are accustomed to drastic annual changes in sunlight and darkness. Habit always wins.

Currently, jurisdictions reserve the right to set the time standard for their area. Arizona and Hawaii don’t do DST. There are some places in the world where the locals set the time a half-hour off instead of an hour. Like Newfoundland. I’m sure they’ve been asked why they insist on it, and the answer is, they’re Newfies, and the rest of the world just has to deal with it, if they deal with Newfies, and of course, vice-versa. Who is “off,” after all, they our us? But hey, the time should be the time, not a political football.

The winter holidays are coming, as Costco reminded us months ago. All those holiday lights will be turned on in this hemisphere to deliver us all from the dark. But let’s not talk about darkness right now. I live in California.