- In the Western world, the calendar is based on the number of days it takes for the earth to revolve around the sun. However, one earth orbit around the sun does not take an exact number of days. It takes 365 days, 5 hours, 49 minutes, and 16 seconds.
- Before Julius Caesar, the Romans observed a year as 355 days, with an extra month of 22 days every two years. Eventually, they ran into problems with Easter and feast days cycling around to the wrong seasons. Can you imagine having an extra month every two years?
- In 46 BC, Caesar ordered his topnotch Greek astronomer to fix the problems. The solution resulted in the Julian Calendar, or a 365 day year, with an additional day every four years to accommodate the extra hours. I think an extra day is less confusing than a whole extra month, don’t you?
- The calculations creating the Julian Calendar were 11 minutes in error which, among other things, caused Easter to drift further from the spring equinox each year.
- Pope Gregory XIII could not stomach Easter fluctuating away from the equinox. He established various councils to address the problems with the Julian Calendar and with the lunar calendar used by the Church. The pope introduced a new calendar in 1582, which we know as the Gregorian Calendar. The Gregorian Calendar is still off by 26 seconds, which doesn’t seem like much but adds up over the years.
- Basically, a leap year occurs every four years. According to the US Naval Observatory via Wikipedia: Every year that is exactly divisible by four is a leap year, except for years that are exactly divisible by 100, but these centurial years are leap years if they are exactly divisible by 400. For example, the years 1700, 1800, and 1900 are not leap years, but the year 2000 is.
- Leap years have special attributes:
Many cultures share a tradition of women asking men to marry them in a leap year, as opposed for waiting on the man to pop the question. The woman must wear a red petticoat. If the man says no, he owes the woman 12 pairs of gloves. These are modern times, and a woman can ask a man for his hand in marriage whenever she wants. If you wish to follow the leap year tradition, however, this is the year and today is the day.
If you are born on February 29, you still get to celebrate your birthday, but you don’t have to COUNT the birthday. This can be a neat trick as we age. My grandmother, the original Flossie Benton, only claimed herself one year older every four years.
Cheers & Happy Reading!
Flossie Benton Rogers, Conjuring the Magic with Paranormal Romance
Intriguing post.I never got leap year but I’m not a math Wizard. I day every four years is less confusing than the months lol.
True, Cathy, I would hate to have to keep track of a new month.
What a neat post. Leap years fascinate me. Personally, I don’t know anyone who was born on February 29th but I still tend to think of that birth date as magical. How cool that your grandmother was one of those special people. I like her way of counting birthdays 🙂
How funny about women having to wear red when popping the question. Why, I wonder?
Well, apart from that, how clever the ancient people were though they didn’t possess all the paraphernalia of our modern times, computers and other things that get smarter than people every day.
I had a great grandmother who was born on 29th February. She, like your grandmother, used to laugh and say she was so young because of that.
Yeh, I didn’t come across why it would be red, but I wonder if it was because the role was so foreign to women on normal days. Or maybe it has to do with the menstrual cycle. Just guessing! I glad my grandmother and your great were forever young.
They fascinate me, too. I love how our forebears measured time and space.