The times they are a-changin’

Two of my favorite days happened this week: Dec. 25, Christmas; and Dec. 21, the Winter Solstice.

The reason I like Christmas should be obvious. I like the Winter Solstice because it’s the shortest day of the year. That means from now on the days are getting longer and we’ll be getting more daylight to combat winter’s deep gray funk.

The Winter Solstice can be one of two days: Dec. 21 or 22, but it occurs more often on the 21st. And it happens at the same time everywhere on Earth. The winter solstice is the day when the sun is at its lowest point in the sky in the Northern Hemisphere. This year it happened precisely at 3:21 a.m. Central time.

Officially winter begins at this moment, but meteorologists — and the rest of us — generally consider Dec. 1 is the start of winter.

The Summer Solstice — when the sun is at its highest point in the sky — occurs on June 21, marking the official beginning of summer. That’s the point at which days start becoming shorter by a minute or two. It doesn’t seem like much until all of a sudden it’s dark around 4:30 p.m. and you begin to wonder where all the time went.

(For people in the Southern Hemisphere, the summer and winter solstice dates are flipped.)

I bring this up because last week our President-Elect Donald Trump announced that he wants to outlaw Daylight Saving Time. For some reason he thinks it’s inefficient and costly. I don’t know where he comes up with this thinking. Daylight Saving Time began in 1918 in the United States to conserve energy during World War I, but it turns out that it neither costs nor saves money over the course of a year. Those dairy cows have to be milked twice a day and they don’t care what time it is.

Farmers used to oppose Daylight Saving Time, but I haven’t heard any complaints from them about it lately. Maybe it’s because there are hardly any dairy herds in Iowa any more. The people who operate golf courses and amusement parks are great champions of DST.

In the mid-20th Century a lot of people groused about Daylight Saving Time because it was a chore to physically set the clocks forward an hour in the spring and back in the fall. Today most clocks are controlled by computers and smart phones, programmed to switch themselves automatically every March and November. In fact, cars today are so smart that their clocks correct themselves when crossing time zones. Our digital watches and phones do the same.

For a long time not all states even participated in Daylight Saving Time. Indiana and Arizona were the longest holdouts and stayed on standard time year ‘round. Indiana finally caved in 2006, but those hard-headed sun-worshippers in Arizona are still holdouts. But those nut cases are still fighting the 2020 presidential election.

I don’t really care whether we keep or ditch Daylight Saving Time. It’s a solution in search of a problem. We have more substantial issues to work on than this, like making sure Congress passes a budget on time to keep the government operating.

In the meantime, Happy New Year! It begins at midnight Wednesday, Jan. 1. Central Standard Time.