Who, what and when on February 29th

Still with us?

The next leap years are 2028, 2032 and 2036.

Who came up with leap year?

The short answer: it has evolved.

Ancient civilizations used the universe to plan their lives, and there are calendars dating back to the Bronze Age. It was based either on the phases of the moon or the sun, as is the case with various calendars today. Usually they “lunisolar” used both.

Now move on to the Roman Empire and Julius Caesar. He was dealing with significant seasonal drift on used calendars in his neck of the woods. They dealt poorly with drift by adding months. He was also traveling in a wide range of calendars, starting on a wide range of routes in the vast Roman Empire.

He introduced his Julian calendar in 46 BC. It was purely solar and the number of days in the year was 365.25 days, so an extra day was added once every four years. Before that, the Romans counted the year as 355 days, at least for a time.

However, during the reign of Julius, there was a deviation. There have been a lot of leap years! The solar year is not exactly 365.25 days! That's 365,242 days, says Nick Ickes, a professor of astronomy at the Morehead Planetarium and Science Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Adding time periods to a year to reflect differences in lunar and solar cycles was something the ancients did, says Thomas Balema, a professor of classics at the University of Texas at Austin. He says that the Athenian calendar was used in the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries with 12 lunar months.

But that didn't work with seasonal religious rituals. The drift problem led to an extra month being periodically “injected” to realign with the lunar and solar cycles, Balema says.

The Julian calendar was 0.0078 days (11 minutes and 14 seconds) longer than the tropical year, so errors in timekeeping were still gradually accumulating, according to NASA. But stability has increased, Balema says.

The Julian calendar was the model used by the Western world for hundreds of years. Enter Pope Gregory XIII, who calibrated even more. His Gregorian calendar came into effect in the late 16th century. It is still in use today, so obviously it is not perfect or there would be no need for a leap year. But it was a huge improvement, reducing the drift to mere seconds.

Why do you interfere? Well, Easter. It was coming later in the year as time went by, and he was concerned that Easter-related events such as Pentecost might conflict with pagan festivals. The Pope wanted Easter to remain in the spring.

He eliminated some of the extra days accumulated in the Julian calendar and modified the rules on leap day. Pope Gregory and his advisors have come up with very difficult calculations about when there should or should not be a leap year.

“If the 365.25 solar year were perfect, we wouldn't have to worry about the difficult calculations involved,” says Ickes.

What's the deal with leap years and marriage?

Oddly enough, Leap Day comes with traditions about women popping the marriage question to men. It was mostly fun, but it came with a sting that reinforced gender roles.

There is a distant European folklore. One story places the idea of ​​women proposing in fifth-century Ireland, where St. Bridget implored St. Patrick to give women the opportunity to ask men to marry them, according to historian Katherine Parkin in a 2012 paper in The New York Times Magazine. Family History Journal.

No one really knows where it all started.

In 1904, columnist Elizabeth Meriwether Gilmer, also known as Dorothy Dix, summed up the tradition this way: “Of course people will say…that women's leap-year privilege, like most of their liberties, is a mere shining mockery.”

The pre-Sadie Hawkins tradition, no matter how serious or satirical, might have served to empower women but only perpetuated stereotypes. The performances were supposed to take place via postcards, but many of these cards turned the tables and mocked the women instead.

The advertisement perpetuated the leap year marriage game. A 1916 advertisement by the Industrial Bank of America and Trust Company read: “On this day of the leap year, we suggest that every girl suggest to her father that a savings account be opened in her name at our bank.”

There was not the same independence for women because of Leap Day.

Should we pity the jumps?

Being born in a leap year on a leap day is definitely a moot point. But it can be kind of a pain from a paperwork perspective. Some governments and others required filling out forms and stating birthdays, and stepped in to announce the date they used hops for things like driver's licenses, whether it was February 28 or March 1.

Technology has made it easier for babies to note their milestones on February 29, although there may be some glitches with health systems, insurance policies, and with companies and other institutions that do not have this date.

There are about 5 million people around the world who share a Leap Christmas out of about 8 billion people on the planet. Shelley Dean, 23, in Seattle, Washington, takes a rosy stance on being a hop. Growing up, she had regular birthday parties every year, but she would throw a very special one when the leap years rolled around. Because, as an adult, she marks the no-jumping period between February 28 and March 1 with a low-key “whew.”

This year is different.

“This will be the first Christmas I'll celebrate with my family in eight years, which is very exciting, because last leap day I was on the other side of the country in New York for college,” she says. “It's a very big year.”

What would happen without a leap day?

Ultimately, there is nothing good in terms of when major events occur, when farmers plant, and how the seasons align with the sun and moon.

“Without leap years, in a few hundred years we would have… [the northern] “Summer is in November,” says Yunus Khan, a physics professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. “Christmas will be in the summer. There will be no snow. There will be no Christmas feeling.”