The days seem somehow even shorter once the holidays are over.

Call me crazy, but I think it's true. I think it's easy to get distracted by how short the days feel in the middle of the holiday season, once the hub-bub of setting the clocks back is over. At least there's always something to look forward to at the end of the year. The first day of winter kind of comes and goes with a lot of fanfare. But it is the shortest day of the year.

Then when the holidays are over, it just feels like it gets dark at noon, hahaha. Obviously it's a smidge later than that, but not much more. And without the the holidays to kind of take the edge off, it becomes all too real that our precious daylight hours seem murderously short.

So then, at what rate do we gain it back?

We begin to gain it back at the rate of approximately two minutes a day after the winter solstice. One minute in the morning, and one minute at night. It seems like a pretty slow crawl, because well, it is. But, to put it in more general terms, it means we gain almost a quarter hour each week.

And to take that one step further, that means we gain about seven minutes a week on our end of day length. So, we should start seeing the sun set after 5:00pm around the end of February. Right around the 26th - 28th. It may not seem like much, but it does a lot for your mental wellbeing if it's light out when you get out of work.

I get up really early, so I also enjoy the fruits of it when I see the sun shining brightly by 6:00am. I get tired of walking the dog in the dark. It's a bit sad, hahaha. But soon enough, we'll all get what we need, if we can just hang tight until the end of February. Then we can get back to complaining about potholes and mud. Yay.

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