As some of you know, I’m a big fan of holidays — I like them so much I even make up some of my own from time to time. Well, today isn’t exactly a holiday, but maybe it should be. Today, of course, is leap day and for a day that has only occurred 102 times previously, seems to me it should be treated special.
We all know that leap day occurs every four years — well, almost anyway. A leap year is any year whose year is exactly divisible by 4 except those which are divisible by 100 but not 400. How come? Because the exact number of days in a solar year is actually ever-so-slightly less the 365.25 (it’s 365.242374) so the algorithm to calculate leap years had to be designed such that a leap year is skipped every now and then to keep the calendar on track over the long haul.
People born on leap day are called “leaplings,” or “leapers.” It was once thought that leaping babies would inevitably prove to be sickly and “hard to raise,” although no one remembers why.
The fact is that the whole point of adding an extra day to February every four years was to align the human measurement of time more closely with nature, when the practice was started, some people apparently believed that monkeying with the calendar might actually throw nature out of whack, even hampering the raising of crops and livestock. In Scotland, there was a saying that, “Leap year was never a good sheep year.”
Another tradition that dates back at least four centuries holds that leap years confer upon women the privilege of proposing marriage to men instead of the other way around. The origin of this (romantic?) tradition is probably long forgotten.
But back to today. February 29 should be a holiday because most years, it doesn’t exist — but this year, it does. So I figure it’s a “free day.” Since the day didn’t even exist last year, you obviously didn’t go to work, or keep doctor appointments, sit in rush hour traffic, or any of those things you normally do.
Because this is really a nonexistent day, let’s just all do something that we wouldn’t normally do. Just skip work and wander around aimlessly for no apparent reason. We should all give it a try — we seem to get by without this extra day all the other years, and I don’t ever remember getting paid more in leap years, so what the heck, let’s take this nonexistent day to do stuff we never do — after all, we won’t have another chance for four more years.
—30—
I wish I had read this earlier in the day instead of right before I went to bed, then I could have taken your advice. It would’ve been a good day to wander around aimlessly.