Time to ‘Fall back’

Early in the morning this Sunday, Nov. 7, millions of modern electronic clocks will automatically set themselves back one hour. Some who still prefer the elegance of a clock with minute, hour, and, occasionally, second hands will twist a dial - or possibly even manually nudge a clock's hands - to turn back time. Yep, Daylight Savings is over with for another year.

The change officially goes into effect at 2 a.m., which will become 1 a.m. As noted, your modern devices will cheerfully make this change for you without supervision, but if you have some recalcitrant timepieces that require a bit of urging to retread an hour they've already marked, there's no harm in making the change before you drift off to slumber.

Waiting until morning to make the autumn change won't make you late to church, as delaying the spring shift might, but will deprive you of that luxurious extra hour of slumber that's literally the best part of the whole Daylight Savings system.

Although earlier cultures had experimented with shifting schedules based on the season, the modern Daylight Savings system got its start in Port Arthur, Ontario, Canada. Our neighbors to the north first saved an hour of daylight on July 1, 1908.

A decade later, prompted by World War I, several other nations — including the USA — adopted the system. Some countries abandoned the shift after the war, but Canada, UK, France, Ireland and the United States kept the system in place, and it's been that way ever since.

Unless initiatives to end the system see unprecedented success, the clocks will steal that hour back March 13, 2022.