The ominous Leap Day is back, and with the classic birthday confusion also comes many customs and traditions that aren’t talked about enough. It’s time that we all find out what Leap Day actually is and the little quirks that come with it.
The calendar year is usually 365 days, also called a “common year” which defines how long it takes for the Earth to complete its orbit around the Sun. What many don’t know is that 365 is a rounded number for the length of Earth’s orbit. According to an article titled “The Science of Leap Year” by Bob Craddock, Craddock writes “It takes Earth 365.242190 days to orbit the Sun, or 365 days 5 hours 48 minutes and 56 seconds. This “sidereal” year is slightly longer than the calendar year, and that extra 5 hours 48 minutes and 56 seconds needs to be accounted for somehow.”. The reason these extra 5 hours and some change aren’t thrown into the wind and forgotten about is because the seasons would begin to drift. Craddock states that if this extra time is not to be accounted for, “over a period of about 700 years our summers, which we’ve come to expect in June in the northern hemisphere, would begin to occur in December!”.
One Leap Day custom originated in Ireland, where St. Brigid struck a deal with St. Patrick to allow women to propose to men, instead of the opposite, every four years. It was an example of balance in relationships the way Leap Day balances out the calendar. Though now this is an outdated concept, it can be a really cute proposal idea for anyone wanting to shake up their engagement.
To go along with Ireland’s proposal custom, Leap Day is also sometimes known as “Bachelors’ Day” under similar reasoning. If the man refused the proposal on Leap Day, he is expected to pay a penalty, and in many European countries that penalty was gloves. In the upper classes of society, the man would gift the woman 12 pairs of gloves to hide the fact that she didn’t have an engagement ring. Again, this concept is severley outdated, but in the Middle Ages there were laws that held this tradition in place.
In Taiwan, Leap Years are considered unlucky for the elderly. To combat this superstition, daughters prepare a dish of pig trotter noodles for their elderly parents which is believed to bring health and good fortune. Similarly with superstitious activity, the French newspaper La Bougie du Sapeur only has a publication once every four years on Leap Day since 1980. This makes it the least frequently published newspaper in the world and outsells the other newspapers on Leap Day.
Though the idea of Leap Day seems to be willy-nilly and unimportant, it holds a lot of significance in the way the world works. This year, take a new perspective on this extra day of fun and enjoy some pig trotter noodles while reading a copy of La Bougie du Sapeur.
