Max Martin enjoys the cold. 

He likes the short days and the long nights and the sweatshirts and the fires and the fog. 

So when he learned that he was going to have to set his clock forward ahead an hour this weekend to speed the arrival of spring – and lose an hour of sleep in the process – the local college student said that he wasn’t the happiest of campers. 

Even if camping is something that he enjoys when summer finally does arrive. 

“Who doesn’t like the extra hour of sleep that you get (when time returns to normal in the fall)?” Martin asked. “But if you think about it, this kind of offsets everything as it evens it out so I guess it isn’t really that bad. I just don’t want the winter, which we really haven’t had this year, to be over already. I’m not ready for it to warm up yet.”

Daylight Savings Time officially starts this Sunday at 2 a.m.

While the idea of maximizing the use of daylight dates back to the establishment of standard time zones in the United States during World War I, the idea wasn’t adopted nationwide until President Franklin Roosevelt pushed for what was called “War Time” in 1942. The Uniform Time Act of 1966 synced up regional variations of the interpretation, and the modern day incarnation of what is now known as Daylight Savings Time was born.

During a modern era, however? Not so much, says Kelly Mijares. 

The commuter said she would rather have uniformity and a slight variation in the length of days than such a drastic shift, especially considering that the practice of doing so dates back to a time when conserving electricity at night was much more common and working outdoors was something that more Americans did. 

“It throws your interior clock off because you get used to seeing the sun either up when you get up or down when you get home. And all of a sudden that isn’t the case,” she said. “I know that my kids like it because it means that they get to stay outside and play longer. But I don’t see how it makes as much sense today as it did at one point. Just keep it the same.”

But not everybody is against it. 

Chris Kennedy says that there’s a pretty good chance that he would likely be doing something on Saturday night that would lead to a wasted hour of sleep anyway, so throwing in some extra daylight as an added bonus isn’t a bad thing. 

Not everybody, he said, enjoys the early sunset, and in a place like California it makes sense to enjoy as much sunshine as possible. 

“One of the big things that you’re seeing in California today is a push towards solar, and this is the time of year that people are really going to start to see the savings if that is a technology that they’ve gone towards,” Kennedy said. “You already don’t have to use your lights when the sun is out. Why not generate electricity at the same time?

“Plus, we live in a place with weather that draws people from around the world. We should enjoy that. That’s what I’m going to do.”