Leap Day - February 29th.......So what gives?

Today is a rare occasion and therefore by that very fact.....a special one - and no it's not my birthday :) - today is a leap day...February 29th.

First the science......apparently we need  to keep our calendar in alignment with the Earth's revolutions around the sun. Allegedly...and who am I to dispute such a fact...it takes the Earth approximately 365.242199 days – or 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 46 seconds (a tropical year)– to circle once around the Sun.

However, the Gregorian calendar has only 365 days in a year, so if we didn't add a day on February 29 nearly every 4 years, we would lose almost six hours off our calendar every year. After only 100 years, our calendar would be off by approximately 24 days - so there you have it.

It was Julius Caesar who first introduced the leap year in 46 bc but the Julian calendar did this by simply stating that any year evenly dividable by 4 would be a leap year. Seems good enough but this led to far too many leap years being created and eventually it was rectified 1500 years later....one assumes they just muddled through in the mean time!

So how do we do it now? Well it goes something like this; three criteria have to be met for it to be a leap year and hence have February 29th (the allocated leap day...although why this date remains a mystery to me); these are that  the year is divisible by four and if the year can be evenly divided by 100, it is not a leap year unless, the year is also divisible by 400 - then it is a leap year. Clear as mud huh.

So what does Leap Day mean to us mere mortals? Apparently as tradition has it and according to legend or was it history???? Anyway allegedly St Bridget struck a bargain with St Patrick to allow women to propose marriage to men, once every four years (we could talk about discrimination here but let's move on...).  This was introduced to balance the traditional roles of men and women in a similar way to how Leap Day balanced the Calendar.  Doesn't seem a particularly even balancing act but I guess it was a start.  

Leap Day has also been known as Bachelors Day for the same reason and a man was expected to pay a penalty such as clothing or money, if he refused a proposal from a woman on Leap Day (I'm all for equality but again this seems a bit unfair). In many European countries the story goes that if a man refused the proposal, he had to buy the woman 12 pairs of gloves (one for each month? Shoes would have been so much more exciting!) so that the woman could hide the embarrassment of not having an engagement ring and during the middle ages there were actually laws governing this.  Thankfully times have moved on.....So anyone proposing to anyone today????