Every fourth year, our otherwise predictable, relatively repetitive civic calendar does something just a little bit different (albeit predictably so), which makes me think that today, February 29 – this extra day we have every fourth year, every « Leap Year » – should always be a holiday! (After all, why should labor-extracting employers be given the benefit of an extra day’s labor by their employees, just because this happens once every four years?)
« Leap year, » as anyone who cares already knows, was first introduced into the ancient Roman calendar by Julius Caesar in 46 B.C. Originally, Caesar intended a »Leap Year » to occur every fourth year, which was what happened until the introduction of the reformed Gregorian Calendar in October 1582. Caesar’s reform, while presumably an infinite improvement over whatever the Romans had been doing with their calendar before, was nonetheless slightly off, so much so that by the 16th century the Julian Calendar was about 10 days off, The Gregorian Calendar, which we now almost universally use, corrected Caesar’s calculations by omitting 3 leap years every 400 years – e.g., not adding the extra day in 1700, 1800, and 1900, but doing so in 2000 (As a result, the Julian and Gregorian calendars are now a full 13 days out of sync.)
For reasons that made more sense to an ancient Roman than to us, Caesar inserted the extra « leap year » day in late February – duplicating the sixth day before the Kalends of March, which in the Roman way of computing dates was February 24. (February 23, the seventh day before the Kalends of March, was the pre-Christian Roman feast of Terminalia, devoted to Terminus, the god of boundaries, temporal as well as geographical, which may perhaps explain Caesar’s choice of the following day.) Hence, the Latin term for « leap year » is annus bisextilis, i.e., a year in which the sixth day before the Kalends of March occurs twice. This curious term for what in English we call leap year is as a result common in all the Romance languages, for example, “anno bisestile” in Italian.
In the pre-conciliar Roman liturgical calendar, the sixth day before the Kalends of March, February 24, was celebrated as the feast of Saint Matthias. But in a « leap year, » when there were two sixth days before the Kalends of March, Saint Matthias was celebrated on the second of them, February 25. Sadly – and to no noticeable advantage to anyone – the present, post-conciliar calendar reassigned Saint Matthias to May 14. So another quaint survival from liturgical antiquity was gratuitously abandoned.
Be all that as it may, we still have this oddity of « leap year, » which gives us a February of 29 instead of 28 days and means that for the next 12 months every date will fall two days of the week later instead of the usual one. (Hence the term « leap year. »)
In my ignorant youth, I very foolishly embraced the project of an artificial, invariable « World Calendar. » Having long ago recovered from the ultra-rationalist folly underlying the proposed « World Calendar, » I can now better appreciate the charm of having so much variety in our actual calendar! (The Second Vatican Council wisely poured cold water on the proposed « World Calendar » with its caveat that, when it comes to any alternative calendar system, the Church has no objection only in the case of those systems which retain and safeguard a seven-day week with Sunday, without the introduction of any days outside the week, so that the succession of weeks may be left intact.)
Not surprisingly, all sorts of popular folkloric customs have developed over the centuries in regard to « leap year. » There is, for example, the British-Irish tradition (dubiously associated with Saint Brigid of Kildare, whose 1500th anniversary has been celebrated this very month) that a woman may take the initiative and propose marriage to a man in « Leap Year. »
I don’t know what to make of that curious concession in today’s very changed society. But I still think this extra day should always be a holiday!
