[Chaos-l] Possibly A Stupid Question

[Robert Nielsen]

OK ... something Alice said at the last meeting intrigues me ... and 
doesn't make sense.

Alice said, "the shortest amount of daylight is on December 20th (or 
was it the 21st), but we are already at the earliest sunset ... the 
latest sunrise will occur in January".

I was wondering if someone could explain (or point me to a website 
that explains) how this can be true.   It would seem to me that the 
Earth is continually rotating as it normally does.  The Earth is also 
travelling around the Sun ... as it normally does.   And the Sun 
makes a steady movement across the sky admittedly in a strange shape 
(the analemma) which does change direction at the solstice.   So does 
all this celestial motion cause the sunsets to stop occurring earlier 
BEFORE the sunsets stop occurring later?   Logic seems to dictate 
that the sunsets would get earlier up until the solstice, and the 
sunrises get later ... in a symmetric way.

Any easily understood explanation?

Robert