If You're Confused, Blame Greg

 

by Pa Rock

Calendrical Calculator

If my parents had possessed the good sense to conceive their first pregnancy just twenty-three days before they actually hit the jackpot back in the 1940's, I would be celebrating my 19th birthday today instead of staring down the shotgun barrel at the imminent arrival of number seventy-six in just a little over three weeks.

Wouldn't that be something, to be sitting down to a birthday cake with my name on it and just nineteen candles!  Of course I would still be 912 months old - aka 27,759 days old - and possibly not have enough wind or energy to blow out nineteen flames!

Welcome to Leap Year 2024 - the only time the month of February will have twenty-nine days between the February that occurred in 2020 and the one that will happen in 2028.  The solar calendar, the one used by most of the world, was designed to reflect a complete cycle of the Earth's orbit around the Sun, but that orbit actually takes about three hundred and sixty-five and one-quarter days, so an extra day (February 29th) was added every four years to keep the calendar and the seasons aligned.  We call that auspicious date "Leap Year."

But even the adjustment of an extra day every four years does not  completely end the discrepancy, and to bring the solar calendar into even tighter alignment with the time it actually takes for the Earth to travel around the Sun, one Leap Year has to be dropped in three of every four centuries.  In the Gregorian calendar, the one established by Pope Gregory XIII and the one we use today, there is no Leap Year for years ending in double zeros - unless those years are divisible by four.  So, after Greg finished putting his new calendar together in 1582, and 1600 rolled around, there was a Leap Year because 1600 is divisible by four.  But there was no Leap Year in the years 1700, 1800, or 1900.    But, when 2000 arrived - our beloved New Millennium - there was a Leap Year - which would have given me my 19th candle - if today was my birthday - which it isn't.

If you're confused, blame Greg - and tax the church!

Happy Leap Year anyway!