Spring Forward

The Christian Science Monitor traces the origins of Daylight Savings Time to WWI Germany, where an extra hour of work was desired before nighttime air raids; the tradition continues for tradition’s sake. “The official switch takes place at 2 a.m. Sunday – though, once you twist your watch stem or push the button on digital timepieces, it’ll be 3 a.m. The annual ritual, which ends the first Sunday in November, when we get the hour back, has its holdouts. Arizona, for one, does not make the shift – although if you’re fastidious about changing your watch and you happen to be traveling through the Navajo and Hopi nations that take up the much of the state’s northeast, you’ll stay busy. The Navajo make the switch; the Hopi, surrounded by the Navajo, do not. Hawaii also forgoes the change. It occupies a latitude close enough to the equator that the hours of daylight it sees as the seasons change don’t vary much. Globally, the use of “summer” time, as many countries call the change, shows a strong north-south divide. The vast majority of countries using it are in the northern hemisphere, while the vast majority of countries south of the equator don’t change their clocks during the longer periods of daylight in the austral spring and summer.”