Did you know it actually takes longer than 365 days for Earth to orbit the Sun? Okay so it only takes 365.2421 days, but after years of missing that time, it adds up! This is the scientific basis for what we call a leap year but there is actually much more to this seemingly simple extra day of the year.
As far back in time as the Ancient Egyptians, people have calculated the need for a leap day. We can thank Julius Caesar for the creation of the official leap year; it wasn’t until Caesar created a new Roman calendar, the Julian Calendar, that we officially accounted for this extra time every four years. But there was still another problem! Since the solar year is not an exact 365.25 long, there was still an extra 11 minutes of time to account for. This led to the creation of the current Gregorian calendar. You might think leap year just means adding an extra day every four years, but there is more to it. To make sure we don’t have a surplus of time as the Julian Calendar did, we do not observe leap year in years evenly divisible by 100 or 400.
We still see remnants of this history in our modern calendar, the month of July is named after Julius Caesar and August after his political heir Augustus. We also see the effect of political ego. Augustus was upset that the month named after him originally had less days than July, named after his predecessor. To make up for this discrepancy, he took days from another month, February, and added them to August which is why February suffers from being the shortest month of the year. There are the benefits of being the ruler of the largest empire in the world.
Leap year isn’t just about science, there is also fiction surrounding the extra long year. Leap Day has become known as the one day women are allowed to propose to their suitors. The origin of this tradition has been attributed to many historical figures including St.Patrick and Queen Margaret of Scotland but no one knows for sure how it quite got it’s start. It is also observed that a man must pay a penalty if he refuses a woman’s proposal, usually giving her gloves or fabric to cover the fact that she isn’t wearing an engagement ring.
Some countries follow different ideas such as Greece where it is considered unlucky to marry not just on the day, but the entire leap year. Any person born on a leap day are invited to join The Honor Society of Leap Year Day Babies and depending on what country they live in, are given an official birth date of February 28th or March 1st. In Norway, there is a family where all three children were born on a leap day! We may no longer believe the myths and superstitions surrounding leap year but we can’t ignore the fact that this one day was a main cause for the creation of the calendar we use to this day, and that calls for some attention. So as we get closer to Leap Year day on February 29th, 2016, we hope you will come join us and celebrate this day that only appears once every four years.
