We get an extra day this year. Not unusual. We get one every four years.
All this because no one has every been able to figure out how to make a quarter day work with any sort of calendar. There have been many attempts through human history. I don’t think any of them work particularly well.
So we get leap day. Every four years, February gets a random extra day. But what do we do with it?
Since this is an unusual occurrence, you would think we would have come up with some way to mark the day. Not really. Seems the best we have been able to do is a sort of Sadie Hawkins Day.
The tradition in Great Britain and Ireland that has been around longer than anyone can remember, which basically means no one can figure out when it started, is that a woman can ask for a man’s hand in marriage. Today, this may seem like a pretty sexist idea, but this has been around for centuries.
There were ways for a man to get out of this, but it would cost them. In some places, they could buy the woman twelve pairs of gloves. In others, they could purchase enough cloth for her to make a new dress. In Scotland, it was a fine that had to be paid by the man. There is also a legend that St. Patrick came up with a way for men to recognize that they were about to be proposed to. The woman who was about to propose was supposed to wear breeches or scarlet bloomers. That way men could see her coming and run for the hills.
Then there’s the non-tradition tradition. There was a tradition in England that since February 29 was a extra day, nothing applied, so there could be no traditions.
There are a few other variations on these themes, but basically, we have an extra day and not much to do with it. Which when you get right down to it, seems like a pretty good idea. Make Leap Day a day with nothing to do.
Although maybe we could move it? Like perhaps July 32?
