Am I storing the value properly?

Stuck on yet another challenge:

The last part of this particular challenge asks me to store "morning," in a new variable called $time and then to write if/else statements that will color A tags depending on which value is stored in the $time variable (in this particular example, the values are "morning," "afternoon," and everything else).

The problem is that I keep getting an error message saying that I need to define the variable $time and store the value "morning" into it.

Here's my code:

$time {
  content: "morning";
}


@mixin time($time) {
    @if $time == morning {
    a{
      color: red;
      }
    }

  @else if $time == afternoon {
  a{
    color: blue;
    }
  }

  @else {
  a{
  color: gray;
    }
  }
}

It's the first part of this code that's the problem... apparently.

What am I doing wrong here? Any feedback would be great!

Thanks so much in advance!

Sincerely,

Todd S