so dark!
Day length changes quick this time of year! Just last week were celebrating the equinox, and still feeling pretty summery; now we find it's still pitch dark at six in the morning. That's tough! Unlike most everyone around us, though, we don't mind so much the earlier sunsets. As a family of morning people, we tend to be winding down after dinner—or even before dinner!—anyways, so it's nice when the sky agrees with us.
Unlike a lot of Americans, I don't object to winter to the point of Seasonal Affective Disorder or anything like that. We don't have it that bad here in New England—there's not a lot of talk about SAD in Spain, I don't think, despite their sharing a latitude with us. We just happen to have some darkness and some snow, and I guess that's enough to get folks down. If you ask me, though, we most of us are sleep deprived all the time; maybe the shortening days can be a helpful hint to get to bed a little earlier! I imagine how cozy things must have been before electric lights and capitalism, when at midwinter there was nothing to do but sleep or sit around telling stories. Assuming you weren't starving to death, of course—first-world modernity does have some benefits.
I think the real problem people have with SAD may be because they have to work indoors all day. It's super hard to get up in the dark to go in to work, sit all day under florescent lights, and then come home in the dark. The natural world is telling them to go to bed, but that would mean a day of doing nothing but meaningless alienated labor. Like in this AskMe question. But if you ask me the answer isn't to stay up late and wake up with the help of fancy light alarms, it's to quit your job and become a hobo who sleeps and rises with the natural rhythm of the sun. Though I understand that doesn't work for everyone.
Ahem. All that is to say, I certainly agree that dark mornings make it much harder to wake up. I'm so glad we live on the eastern edge of our time zone! And I'm one of the few people to welcome the arrival of standard time, when it finally rolls around after Halloween. Until they get rid of entirely, which I imagine is only a matter of time. Oh well, by then I'll be a hobo myself so it won't bother me at all.