Leaplings
Anything hatched on February 29 has a special meaning in culture.
“I proposed to G.; we’re getting married.”
My sister is a pragmatic person in a family of four generations of strong women. I didn’t think it was strange. They got married September of that year. The Greeks would have been horrified—to them it’s bad luck to marry on a Leap Year.
Hers was not like the scene in The Proposal where Margaret Tate/Sandra Bullock performs incredible acrobatics to get on her knees and convince Andrew Paxton/Ryan Reynolds to ‘marry me please, cherry on the top.’ (Bullock made it look cool and easy in tight skirt and platform shoes, but Betty White steals the show in that film.)
Humans are creatures of patterns. Whenever a pattern varies, we find an explanation to go with the variance. Julius Caesar was the emperor who gave us the extra day every four years to improve the accuracy of the Roman solar calendar.
Since 45 BC, leap year has come to either represent an opportunity or bad luck based on the value we assign to the day/month/year in culture. If you birthday’s on February 29, you’re a ‘leapling’ (happy birthday) and celebrated on the actual day this year.
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Apparently, proposals to men have been a thing in leap years since the 5th century in Ireland. Saint Brigid made a deal with Saint Patrick—saint to saint—to institute what was called Ladies’ Privilege every four years.
In Ireland February 29 is also Bachelor’s Day. If the man refused the lady’s proposal, the proper thing to do was to buy her an expensive gift—a silk gown, a fur coat, a pair of gloves—to make one’s excuses sweeter.
The tradition spread through several countries in what we now call Europe.
Queen Margaret of Scotland thought the Ladies’ Privilege was a good idea. In 1288 she made it a law—the lady must wear a red petticoat, and the man who refused should pay a monetary compensation (or gloves. It is still winter, after all.)
Denmark adopted the tradition with the twist that a man who refused had to buy twelve pairs of gloves. And here we finally learn the meaning—so the woman could cover her ring-less hands for the year. In Finland it was fabric to make a skirt.
It was fine to propose, but bad luck to be born on leap year in Scotland. An old saying states that a ‘leap year was never a good sheep year.’ Scottish farmers probably worried for their livestock every yer, but the superstition added worry.
On leap year, German girls in Rhineland can place a small birch tree decorated with ribbons (a Liebesmaie) on the doorstep of their crush. Which means they can adopt the May-Day tradition for love-struck young boys.
Schaltjahr wird Kaltjahr as the German proverb says, this year February 29 was a very cold day—a swing of twelve degrees Celsius in our neck of the woods. Let’s hope ‘leap year is (not) a cold year,’ Punxsutawney Phil predicted an early spring. (There’s another tradition, all American, where the groundhog is right only 30 percent of the times.)
The French have an interesting twist to the celebration.
In France, La Bougie du Sapeur, a 20-page tabloid newspaper (‘The Sapper’s Candle) hits kiosks on leap year. The 200,000 run is only available on paper, is anti-politically correct, and was started in 1980 by four friends in for a laugh.
If you can get hold of a copy, bring your sense of (French) humor. 2024’s headline—We will all be intelligent—a story about how AI is making exams and intellectual achievement redundant. The second lead—What men need to know before becoming women—explains the ‘challenges’ men who want to make the change would face.
I love how humor and irony preserve value in their respective cultures.
And I’d love to get a copy, because it’s refreshing to poke fun at oneself. We do too little of it these days.
The name La Bougie du Sapeur resonates with one of France’s earliest cartoon figures. Le Sapeur Camembert was a simpleton soldier from comic drawings about life in the army in the 1890s.
All profits from the sold-out, 4-euro, rare newspaper go to charity. The four friends hatch each edition over libations at a restaurant. I like everything about this tradition, including its publication schedule—it increases its value.
February 29 in 1504 was a lucky year for Christopher Columbus. He’d been stuck on the island of Jamaica for a few months and had gotten on the nerves of the locals. It’s not a good idea to be arrogant with the people who feed you.
Columbus, who knew the movements of the stars and the moon, used the approaching lunar eclipse to his advantage. He told the natives God would punish them if they didn’t supply him and his crew. On cue, the moon began to obscure and Columbus withdrew to his cabin. Panic ensued.
After the respectable (and opportune) time of more than one hour, the explorer reappeared to announce that if they agreed to deliver supplies, God would withdraw his punishment. As the natives agreed, the moon reappeared.
Columbus and his men didn’t starve until their rescue, which took place three months later—in June of the same year.
Many of the major decisions I made in my life happened on leap years, though not because they were leap years. There was more to it than comparing calendars. Likewise, what happened on the leap years 2008, 2016, and 2020 was the result of decisions that accrued over time. 2024 shall be the same.
I’m with Étienne Fortier-Dubois on suboptimal timekeeping. While it was the Italians in Rome to dictate the calendar we’re still using, it was interesting to learn the French had once again a unique twist to offer—the French Republican Calendar.
The calendar sought to get rid of all pagan and Christian symbolism, leaving only nature, industry, and reason. It started on the Autumn equinox. It was divided into 12 months of equal length, 30 days, and ended with 5 (or 6) monthless days of festivals at the end of summer. The months had no weeks, but had three décades instead: periods of 10 days, named after numbers. Primidi, duodi, tridi, quartidi, all the way to décadi. Instead of Roman gods or Christian observances, the months and days would be associated with symbols from nature and farming. The names of the months in particular were incredibly poetic: Vendémiaire, Brumaire, Frimaire in Autumn; Nivôse, Pluviôse, Ventôse in the Winter; Germinal, Floréal, Prairial in the Spring; and Messidor, Thermidor, and Fructidor for Summer.
They used it during the revolutionary period, 12 years, from 1793 to 1805. But then Napoleon abolished it to everyone’s relief (we don’t like change that others impose on us, and it was quite the change from what people knew.)
So yes, the Gregorian calendar Julius Caesar put in place is still with us today (he borrowed the idea from the Egyptians and made it enduring.) The calculations were a bit off, and the math is not exact. But here’s how they made it work.
365.24219 are the days the earth employs to rotate around the sun and return to its starting position—roughly 365 and one quarter. We round down, then add a day every four years. But the rounding takes the average length of a year to 365.25 days—a bit long.
The Gregorian calendar improves the approximation by removing one of the leap days in years we can divide by 100. This system adds 24 days (vs 25) over a century—a time few of us live. Which then makes the average year 365.24 days—short. So every 400 years we add back one extra leap day.
If you can count so far, that means 97 extra days in total over one 400-year period. The average year length then comes to 365.2425 days—close enough. To summarize what we have so far:
If you can divide the year by four, it’s a leap year—2024.
No leap year if you can divide the year by four and 100.
Leap year if you can divide by 400.
It’s a working approximate. We could be more accurate with more calculations—removing leap days on multiples of 3200, and extra 775 days over that period. The result, 365.2421875, would be even closer to 365.24219.
Why bother with any of it, though? Well, because of the axial tilt of the earth, Planet A where we live. Despite our moving away from the Roman ten-month calendar, we still need to synchronize the seasons with the conventions—summer in Australia when there’s winter in America due to the part of the Earth tilted toward the sun.
We say ‘Christmas in July’ since that summer of 1933 in a camp (retailers and movies popularized it), but I could not imagine the actual Christmas to take place then. That’s why Caesar and his contemporaries added the leap day. They also took one for team humanity and introduced a 445-day year in 46BC to catch up with the solar time.
To learn about the different length of each month, there was a shorthand we used in school, which didn’t address the leap year (but implied February) and roughly translates to:
“Thirty days hath November with April, June and September; of twenty-eight there’s one, all the rest have thirty-one.”
It’s the only way I can keep the months straight in my head, believe it or not.
Despite growing up in Italy, I’m not familiar with the saying ‘leap year, sorrowful year.’ Fortunately I funneled all my energy and resources to buy books, pay school fees, and complete my degree—so I was never in danger or close to making major purchases.
I was pleased to learn that Italian composer Gioachino Rossini (1792-1868), whom you may know for opera buffa ‘The Barber of Seville,’ was a leapling (he also died on a leap year.) Pope Paul III (Alessandro Farnese), the last Renaissance Pope who ruled the papal states from 1534 to his death in 1549, was the only pope (that we know of) born on February 29, 1468.
References:
‘Leap Year Explained: Fascinating Origins, Facts, and Traditions From Around the World,’ Rosetta Stone (Jan 29, 2024)
‘Why do we leap day? We remind you (so you can forget for another 4 years)’ Rachel Treisman, NPR (Feb 26, 2024)
‘Why Julius Caesar’s Year of Confusion was the longest year in history,’ Martha Enriques, BBC (Feb 27, 2024)
‘Famous Birthdays on February 29’ On This Day