I don’t know about you, but since I have only been on this earth for a little over two decades, I haven’t really experienced many leap years. The thought of them coming up doesn’t always cross my mind. So, if you’re like me and had no clue what they were really for, or you just want to learn some fun facts about the leap year, here you go!
- Ever wanna know which years we have a leap year?
-
You can easily calculate this in your head. Leap years only occur the years that are divisible by 4, except years that mark centuries (every 100th year) that are divisible by 400. This rule was added to fix an additional mess up to the calendar from just doing a leap year every 4 years.
- If we didn’t have leap years, our calendar would be seriously messed up.
-
Since it takes the Earth almost 6 hours more than 365 days to completely revolve around the Sun, if we didn’t have a leap year every 4 years, we would be losing six hours a year. As you can imagine, this would quickly add up to lots of days lost from the calendar as the years went on. Eventually, our seasons wouldn’t even match up like they were supposed to.
- Feb. 29 is for the ladies!
-
It is typically tradition for men to propose to their ladies (assuming we only live in a gender binary world, which is quickly changing). A fun leap year tradition that started long ago when St. Patrick gave women one day to propose – leap days.
- A lot of business give leap day sales, so keep a look out!
-
These sales are usually 29 percent off, so definitely quite a bargain! Yay leap day!
- Leap day babies are called “leaplings” or “leapers”.
-
And technically, their real birthday only comes every 4 years… but most celebrate the day before or after on years that aren’t leap years.
As you can see, there’s not much to it, but it is quite interesting how the leap year came about. Happy Leap Year!