February 28, 2024 – Leap Day

Tomorrow is Leap Day! The reason we have leap years is because it actually takes the Earth slightly more than 365 days to orbit the sun – 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 56 seconds, to be exact. An extra day is needed to correct the calendar and compensate for this extra time. If we didn’t have leap years, our seasons would gradually drift – eventually our summers would begin in December instead of June!
In 45 BC, Julius Caesar introduced the Julian Calendar, which included an extra day every year. He got the idea from the Egyptians, though his math wasn’t quite right. By 1577, the Julian calendar had fallen 10 days out of alignment, and important Christian holidays weren’t being celebrated on the right dates. So Pope Gregory XIII took on the problem in 16th century with his Gregorian calendar, which is what we still use today. He specified that leap years would be any year divisible by 4, except century years, which would have to be divisible by 400 to be a leap year. So for example. the year 2000 was a leap year, but 2100 and 2200 aren’t.
In some areas of Ireland and Britain, it’s tradition that women can propose marriage only in leap years. According to legend, in 5th century Ireland, St. Bridget complained to St. Patrick that women weren’t allowed to propose to men. So St. Patrick decided to designate the only day that doesn’t happen annually, February 29, as the only day women would be allowed to propose. In Britain, if a man rejected a woman’s proposal, he owed her several pairs of fine gloves, possibly to hide the fact that she wasn’t wearing an engagement ring! In Greece, it’s considered bad luck to get married in a leap year.
If you have a birthday on February 29, you’re called a “leapling” or a “leaper”. Only around 5 million people in the world are Leaplings. The odds of being born on leap day are 1 in 1,461. Learn more here.