Daylight Saving 2022: When Do Clocks Spring Forward In CT?

CONNECTICUT — Twice a year you are reminded of just which clocks in your home, car, office and maybe even still on your wrist date from a simpler, if less connected era. For those timepieces, get ready to "spring ahead."

Daylight saving time is just around the corner. This year, it begins at 2 a.m. Sunday, March 13, which means later sunsets and the persistent illusion of longer days.

Benjamin Franklin dreamed up the idea of turning the clocks back to grab more daylight in 1784. (Maybe it had something to do with that "early to rise" routine of his?) The notion took a while to catch on. The Unites States wasn't even divided into separate time zones until 1883, and it took until 1918 for Congress to sign it into law.

Of course, the stubborn Yankees up north in Connecticut passed a law in 1923 maintaining Standard Time all year round and prohibiting the "willful public display of daylight saving time," according to Connecticut History. This led to all the chaos you might expect, as federal offices in Hartford and elsewhere in the state kept one clock, local offices another, and farmers followed schedules that made the most sense for their crops and animals. The state law was repealed around a decade later.

Connecticut is now among the 48 states that observe daylight saving time. Hawaii and Arizona leave their clocks alone, although the Navajo Nation in the Grand Canyon State follows the practice.

But just because everybody is doing it doesn't mean everybody's happy with the practice. Americans by a 63 percent to 16 percent margin favoring ditching daylight saving time altogether, according to a recent Economic/YouGov poll.

The reasons the United States observes daylight saving are arguably absurd — as outlined in this video.

State Rep. Kurt Vail, who represents the 52nd District of Somers and Stafford, has been lobbying to keep state clocks sprung ahead permanently, and not revert to daylight saving time in the fall. There are lots of moving parts to that initiative, not least of which include getting neighbors Massachusetts, Rhode Island and New York onto the same page. Florida Senator Marco Rubio has backed similar legislation with bipartisan support at the federal level, but it's gotten no traction.

So, daylight saving time remains a thing in Connecticut. And if anyone knows how to change the clock in a 2016 Subaru Legacy, please email me...

Patch writer Michael Woynton contributed to this report.