How to Prepare for Darker Days

With fall officially here the days are getting noticeably shorter and darker. For many Canadians, daylight savings will take effect on November 6th, blanketing us in long, sleepy nights.

For some, the shorter days and longer nights are anticipated with gleeful plans of sitting around a cozy fireplace and catching up on neglected reading goals. Others might simply feel sad that the long days of summer are over. However you feel about the incoming autumn, it’s happening. Slowly, gradually, until the sun doesn’t rise before 8am and leaves us in grey dusk by 4pm!

For those who live in Canada’s Northern regions, the sun may only make an appearance for an hour or two a day—if at all! For communities who live in this kind of darkness, a strong reliance on man-made light is necessary. And even for those of us who live where daylight and nighttime are split fairly evenly throughout the year, it’s important to remember than an emergency could very well occur at night, when all your defenses are down and you’re lost in the fog of sleep.

Waking up to an emergency in the middle of the night can be extremely disorienting. It might take longer to get your thoughts sorted, so it’s best to prepare for these occurrences so that you can leap out of bed and act without needing to think.

Ideally, this preparation for a nighttime emergency includes a kit that you keep near your bedside—perhaps in your night table?

In fact, your night table may even be the perfect, accessible place for you to store your entire emergency kit, if it’s big enough. We’ll leave that to you though.

What you WILL want to make sure you have in your night stand is a flashlight. You’ll also want to include a radio, or perhaps an instrument that is both a flashlight and radio—so that you can check into the weather forecast before even leaving your room.

If you’re feeling low about the impending darkness, why not cheer yourself up with some handy new gadgets that are so useful and potentially life-saving that they’re bound to be guilt-free purchases!

Article contributed by Sophie Wooding – Avid gardener and cyclist in Victoria, BC and Content Writer for Frontier.io