Leap Year

What is a Leap Year

The Gregorian calendar is the standard calendar used throughout the world, which has common years and leap years.  A common year has 365 days and a leap year has 366 days.  The extra day or intercalary day is the 29th February.  A Leap Year occurs every four years to help synchronize the calendar year with the solar year, or the length it takes the earth to complete its orbit around the sun, which is about 365 1/4 days.

The length of the solar year, however, is slightly less than 365¼ days—by about 11 minutes. To compensate for this discrepancy, the leap year is omitted three times every four hundred years.

What are your chances of being born on leap day?

About 1 in 1,500.

When is the birthday party?

If you are born on a Leap Year, do you get your driver's license on February 28th or March 1st? It is an ambiguous question that is decided by each state. Most states, however, consider March 1st the official day. For instance, the Michigan Vehicle Code states that people born on February 29th "are deemed to have been born on March 1st."

The rules for determining a leap year

Most years that can be divided evenly by 4 are leap years.

Exception: Century years are NOT leap years UNLESS they can be evenly divided by 400.

When did leap year originate?

The Gregorian calendar is closely based on the Julian calendar, which was introduced by Julius Caesar in 45 BC. The Julian calendar featured a 12-month, 365-day year, with an intercalary day inserted every fourth year at the end of February to make an average year of 365.25 days. But because the length of the solar year is actually 365.242216 days, the Julian year was too long by .0078 days (11 minutes 14 seconds).

This may not seem like a lot, but over the course of centuries it added up, until in the 16th century, the vernal equinox was falling around March 11 instead of March 21. In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII adjusted the calendar by moving the date ahead by 11 days and by instituting the exception to the rule for leap years. This new rule, whereby a century year is a leap year only if divisible by 400, is the sole feature that distinguishes the Gregorian calendar from the Julian calendar.

Following the Gregorian reform, the average length of the year was 365.2425 days, an even closer approximation to the solar year. At this rate, it will take more than 3,000 years for the Gregorian calendar to gain one extra day in error.

Traditions

The tradition of women proposing on the 29th of February began in the 5th century when St. Brigid of Kildare complained to St. Patrick that women had to wait too long for men to propose. St. Patrick decreed the women could propose on this one day in February during the leap year

The tradition was then taken to Scotland by Irish monks.

Back in 1288, the Scots passed a law that allowed a woman to propose marriage to the man of their dreams in a Leap Year.  If any man declined the proposal on this day he would have to pay a fine.

The Law was passed by an unmarried Queen Margaret (though records show she must of been only 5 years old at the time) that woman proposing must wear a red petticoat while proposing.  St. Patrick was so busy but he gave her a kiss and a silk gown. This is also debatable because St. Brigid would of been nine or ten years old when St. Patrick died in 461 AD.  In some places, February 29 has been renamed Bachelors' Day because of the tradition