Getting Shabbat Times Right in Houston
Shabbat starts Friday at sunset and ends Saturday night after three stars appear. The timing shifts every week. Houston is in the Eastern/Central time zone debate territory for many synagogues, which complicates things more than you might expect. Most of the city uses ET for Jewish calendrical purposes because that is where the major yeshivas and publishing houses are, but a few places stick with CT. You need to know which your community uses before you light candles. I had a problem last year when a friend was visiting from Los Angeles and kept checking her phone app for candle lighting. The app was set to LA time. She would have lit candles about an hour and forty minutes too early one Friday, which creates an awkward situation when you are still driving or haven't even changed out of work clothes. I got her on Chabad.org and set it to her actual Houston location. That fixed it, but it made me realize how many people just default to whatever app came pre-installed on their phone without verifying the timezone setting. Here is what actually matters for timing: sunset varies by roughly thirty minutes across the year, from about 5:15 PM in mid-December to 8:15 PM in mid-June. Candle lighting is thirty minutes before sunset at most Houston shuls, though some Orthodox communities use twenty minutes. You check your specific congregation's schedule because it is not universal. The end of Shabbat, called Havdalah, is usually sixty-seven minutes after sunset on Saturday night. That is the standard Houston practice. Some follow theGra"Y opinion of forty minutes after sunset, but that is uncommon here unless you are at a strictly Chassidic venue.
The counter-intuitive part nobody tells beginners is that Shabbat actually begins before the clocks say it does in summer. If you arrive at shul for Kabbalat Shabbat service at 6 PM in July and the official lighting time is 7:45 PM, you are technically still in weekday status until those candles are lit. Don't use your phone during service. People do this all the time and nobody corrects them because they assume everyone knows, but the assumption is wrong. The window between arriving early and actual candle time is when you should be standing or sitting quietly, not scrolling. For practical tracking, I use two sources. Chabad.org gives reliable weekly times for Houston ZIP codes. My local shul publishes its own schedule that sometimes differs by five to ten minutes from the national average, and those differences matter if you are moving between communities. The siddurim with built-in calendars are fine for home use but the printed times can be a week or two stale if the book is older than a year. I learned that the hard way in 2019 when my father-in-law's old ArtScroll calendar had incorrect times for two consecutive Saturdays and I almost missed a family dinner because I was early instead of late. If you want automation, the MyZmanim app handles Houston well and alerts you fifteen minutes before candle lighting. It is free and accurate to within a minute. The downside is that it does not always account for the specific custom of your synagogue, so cross-reference it with your house or congregation schedule. I keep both open on my phone on Friday afternoons. It takes about ten seconds and prevents any mistakes.
The one scenario this all fails in is when you are traveling outside Houston but still want to keep accurate times. If you drive to Dallas or San Antonio, the sunset shifts by a few minutes and the app might not auto-correct depending on GPS lag. I once had the app stuck on Houston time while actually in Sherman, which put me two minutes early for lighting. Not a disaster, but enough to be noticeable if you are paying attention. You can manually override the location in MyZmanim or just use Chabad.org and type in the city you are in. Takes three seconds. What people miss is that the custom of your family matters more than the geography. If your family lights at sundown minus twenty minutes and your spouse's family uses thirty, picking one approach and sticking with it avoids conflict. I suggest the thirty-minute standard for Houston because it covers the vast majority of communities here and leaves a comfortable buffer. Going earlier than that without a reason just creates unnecessary stress on Friday afternoons when you are already managing dinner prep and getting kids ready.
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