Happy Leap Day

Well, it’s over. You plan for it for months. You do the decorating and the shopping and the baking, and almost before it starts, it’s over. Now, we’ll suffer the blues as we wait for next time.

Yes, I’m talking about Leap Day.

It only happens once every four years. And unlike Presidential election day, this day doesn’t bombard you with negative commercials or unrealistic promises.

In fact, if you’re not careful, you’ll miss it altogether. One day it’s February 28, and the next it’s March 1. But once every four years, in a magical—perhaps mystical—manner, we are blessed with one more day in our year. 24 more hours.1440 more minutes. I hope you used them wisely.

Also known as an intercalary year, a leap year contains one additional day so that our calendar year remains properly synchronized with the astronomical or seasonal year. But I bet you already knew that.

Now maybe Leap Day doesn’t seem like that big a deal to you, but to some people, it ranks right up there with the best of the special days—like “Take Your Daughter to Work Day”. If you were born on February 29, then it is a very big day, because your birthday only rolls around once every four years. That’s a bummer when you’re younger, but by the time you hit 40 (or “10” as Leaplings like to say), it’s not a bad deal.

Although it is commonly said that leap years occur every four years (I’ve said it at least twice already!), that’s technically not true. A Leap Year occurs in a year whose date is exactly divisible by 4 except those that are divisible by 100 but not 400. Got that? It’s not as easy as you thought, now is it? That’s why we have Wikipedia.

Throughout history, people have come up with some crazy ideas associated with Leap Years. For example, folk lore was that children born on Leap Day had a rebellious streak or could be hard to raise. Well, if you only got a birthday card, cake and gifts every 4 years, you might develop a stubborn streak too.

Farmers believed that beans and peas planted in a Leap Year would grow the wrong way—whatever that means. And in Scotland they used to say, “A Leap Year is never a good Sheep Year”. I hate it when we have bad sheep years.

Perhaps the best known “tradition” associated with Leap Year is that February 29th is the day that women can ask men to marry them. Of course, modern women-folk have no respect for the traditions of the elders (like cleaning house and cooking supper), so today you’ll find loose-women asking men to marry them just about any day of the year. But for those who know their place, they’ll confine their marriage proposals to the proper time.

I started this blog entry on February 29th, but I took too long to finish it, and now it’s March 1st. Well, there’s a lesson there somewhere, but I’ve started my Sabbatical, so I’ll have to wait a while to see what it was. Maybe I’ll come up with something before the Ides of March.