Leap Year Superstitions and Customs

February 29th is a Day to Break Traditions

Leap year is officially any year that has a February 29th in it. While this usually happens every four years, there's actually a mathematical way of determining whether a leap year will occur and the reason for it is a bit scientific too. No, seriously, it isn't a day set by the government just to make us have to mess with our calendars or become confused. They have the IRS and the month of April for those chores.

To be accurate, while a leap year tends to occur every four years, and that's an easy way to remember it, the reality is that leap years will occur in any year that the four digit year is evenly divisible by four. Because of this, at the turn of a century, a leap year may not occur, such as the year 1900, which is not divisible by four, causing a leap year to be skipped that four year period. Y2K, besides being a doomsday prophecy year for the end of the world, is a rare turn of the century in which a leap year did occur.

So why do we have leap years? Well, some will tell you it's because the people who decided to make our calendars didn't want to complicate things so the rounded off the amount of time it takes the earth to revolve around the sun to 365 days, when in reality it takes closer to 365-1/4 days to make its trip around the big ball of fire. So instead of adjusting it by that quarter of a day per year, they decided to take that extra quarter day and store it in a big vault somewhere in Egypt and let it out only once every four years or so.

They'll tell you that it's because they need to do it for setting the calendar right for the seasons, because if they don't do this, eventually, we'd have winter in July in about 10,000 years, but the real reason for this is a government conspiracy to get an extra day of essentially unpaid work out of the government employees to make up for all the official government holidays we now have. Seriously, all you have to do is look at global warming and the greenhouse effect to know this is true, because obviously the government doesn't care one whit about what happens to the world in 10,000 years.