Most people know when the shortest day of the year is.
But most people don’t know that the earliest sunset and the latest sunrise do not fall on that day.
It turns out, the earliest sunset (December 5th) is about 16 days before the shortest day (December 21st), and the latest sunrise is about 15 days after (January 5th).
So honestly, I started thinking about this in late January. I was noticing the “days getting longer”. By this, most of us mean we notice that it’s light for longer after work.
I did some mental math, and realized that it was about 8 weeks after the earliest sunset.
And so I thought … oh … sunset changes are symmetrical … so late January has the same sunset as mid-October. And I thought about how nice those cold evenings are in mid-October.
I decided quickly that daylight savings was a bad thing, and we should move the clocks back right now, so I could have those cold, beautiful evenings full of light until after 7 in late January.
I have been laughing to myself at how dumb I was for about about a week now.
Moving the clock back also moves the sunrise back. And the sunrise was not 8 weeks into transitioning towards summer, but more like four.
And in Utah, most of us live hard up on the west side of the mountains. Twilight in the morning is long: the sun is up, but it remains blocked by the mountains. On the shortest day, it comes over the mountains about 8:35 (even now on February 20th, I was watching rays of sunshine peek through a canyon at 7:45, 30 minutes after sunrise, but the sun wasn’t visible yet).
Why laugh at myself? If we got rid of daylight savings time here, on January 5th, the sun wouldn’t come over the mountains until 9:35. I think maybe I’d like to keep avoiding that.