How do i quickly fade my material to another color after a certain amount of time has passed?

sorry i didnt reply sooner, my use case is a day and night system, i want it to stay blue for awhile, then quickly fade to orange for sunset, then after awhile fade to dark blue for night, and smoothly repeat all this, i tried time and sine nodes into the alpha of a lerp but it fades too fast and the transition looks kinda weird. i MUST do this inside of a post process material though because thats how im doing my skybox, its inside a PPM.