Goodrich – While the study of leap year isn’t normally in Michelle Bell’s curriculum, it comes up once in a while.
Every four years, to be specific.
‘Every time it happens, I look it up again,? said the Goodrich High School science teacher.
Leap year, with 366 days, is one day longer than the common year. Why does the occasional Feb. 29 exist?
‘Because our hours in our days are a little off,? said Bell. ‘If we didn’t have a leap year after four years, pretty soon we’d be an hour off and a day off, or a month off.?
A solar year, or the amount of time it takes for Earth to travel once around the sun, is 365.24219 days long, said Bell, just a smidgeon longer than the common 365-day calendar year. ‘So we add a day every four years to keep our seasons correct.?
While some parents may dread a leap year birthday, leap year doesn’t always happen every four years.
Since adding an extra day every fourth year slightly overcompensates, an occasional leap year gets omitted from the calendar. According to the site www.leapyeardayproject.com, there are 97 leap years in each 400-year period.
‘We need to skip a few leap years, and we do this when the century is not divisible by 400,? Bell said, citing the year 1900 as the most recent example.
Without regularly figuring in an extra day, holidays wouldn’t correspond with seasons. There’d be little chance of a white Christmas if December was pushed back to summer, for example. It’s that kind of occurrence that prompted leap year in the first place, says Bell, after Julius Caesar had to add a substantial block of time to the calendar to even things out ‘because the seasons got messed up.?
‘After that time they decided to add a day every so often,? Bell said.
In addition to keeping the seasons somewhat predictable, today’s Sadie Hawkins dances have their roots in early leap years, when it became legal for nice ladies to initiate romance.
If those laws remained in effect in the United States, ‘single guys who wish to remain that way may want to go into hiding on Feb. 29,? said Kara Kvasnicka, Goodrich branch librarian of the Genesee District Library. ‘According to ‘The Folklore of American Holidays? (Detroit, Gale Research, 1999), leap year day is also known as Ladies Day because of the old tradition permitting women to propose marriage to men during Leap Year.?
The tradition dates back to the Middle Ages, says Kvasnicka, referring to the Scottish law of 1288 officially sanctioning the unconventional practice.
‘Under that law, a man who refused a leap year proposal would be fined one pound unless he could prove he was already betrothed to another,? she said.