DAYLIGHT SAVING TIME

Raise Your Hand if You’ve Ever Felt Victimized by Daylight Saving Time!

Everyone was standing and singing the closing hymn in church. I smiled when the door opened, and one of our members walked into the church. He slipped into the back row and sang with the rest of the congregation.

When the song ended, the man sat down while others continued to stand for the benediction. I watched as he looked around, stood back up, and looked confused. He forgot to change his clock back to Daylight Saving Time.

Don’t forget to set your clocks an hour back, usually before bed Saturday night.

This year daylight saving time starts on Sunday, November 6, 2022, at 2:00 AM Saturday; clocks are set back one hour to the Standard Time when that extra hour of daylight is snatched away in the evening and shifted to the morning hours.

Remind me. How Did This Time Change Start?

When told the reason for Daylight Savings Time, the Old Indian said, “Only the government would believe that you could cut a foot off the top of a blanket, sew it to the bottom, and have a longer blanket.”

History sometimes gives Benjamin Franklin credit for daylight saving time because he wrote a satirical essay in 1784. His story jokingly suggested that people in Paris should change their sleep schedules to save money on candles and lamp oil. But nothing came of it.

However, hunting bugs finally got things rolling toward adopting daylight saving time.

George Hudson, an entomologist from New Zealand, liked to hunt bugs after his day job at the Wellington Post Office, but it got dark too soon.

So, in 1895 he came up with a two-hour time shift. When he proposed it to the Royal Society of New Zealand, they rejected the proposal, but the idea started to spread.

In 1916, two years into World War I, Germany became the first to implement daylight-saving time as a fuel-saving measure.

On March 9, 1918, the United States enacted its first daylight saving law, and Canada followed suit. Hawaii and Arizona, except parts of the Navajo nation, opted out.

Most people like daylight saving time more than the standard time.

• It saves energy. During Daylight Saving Time, the sun sets one hour later in the evenings, so the need to use electricity for household lighting and appliances is reduced. In addition, people tend to spend more time outside in the evenings during Daylight Saving Time, which reduces the need to use electricity at home. Also, because the sunrise is very early in the morning during the summer months, most people will awake after the sun has risen, which means they turn on fewer lights in their homes.
• It saves lives and prevents traffic injuries. In addition, during Daylight Saving Time, more people travel to and from school and work and complete errands during daylight.
• It reduces crime. During Daylight Saving Time, more people are out conducting their affairs during daylight rather than at night, when more crime occurs.

However,  not everyone likes changing our clocks forward and backward each year. In addition, some health concerns occur because of the time change each year.

• Many people lose sleep because of the time change in the spring and never get it back.
• Every year on the Monday after the springtime switch, hospitals report a 24% spike in heart attack visits around the US. However, doctors see an opposite trend each fall: The day after we turn back the clocks, heart attack visits drop 21% as many people enjoy the extra sleep.
• Losing an hour of afternoon daylight after setting the clocks back to standard time can trigger mental illness, including bipolar disorder and seasonal affective disorder (SAD), also known as winter depression.
• Also, there are more car crashes and accidents when time goes back to the fall. Many people are less alert as they adjust to a new sleeping schedule.

In 2020, 32 states engaged in legislation to establish daylight saving time as the official time year-round, whereas most Americans want to stop switching the clocks back and forth twice a year.

When Hudson, author of The butterflies and Moths of New Zealand, died, he was said to have amassed the finest and most perfect collection of New Zealand’s insects ever formed by one person. Yet, there was no mention of his achievement in creating daylight saving time.

But the man who needed more daylight hours to hunt bugs lived to see his brainchild adopted by many nations ? including, in 1927, his own.

Some people might say, “All I Want To Know Is Which Candidate Will Get Rid Of Daylight Savings Time!”

Don’t forget to set your clock back one hour before you go to bed on Saturday, or you may wonder why the church is empty when you arrive.