Leap Year & the Date of Washington's Birthday
February 2016 :
I’d like to wish a Happy Birthday to all of you who happen to be born on February 29th, as you will be able to actually celebrate your real day this year. You all know, of course, that this necessity in dating comes to us from Julius Caesar, who thousands of years ago created the concept of a “leap year” to occur every year divisible by four.
Unfortunately, over the centuries, that caused a rather large shift in the beginnings of the seasons. Especially important to this was the date of the vernal equinox, as the Catholic Church utilized this first day of spring in conjunction with the phases of the Moon to signal the celebration of Easter. Because of this, Pope Gregory XIII modified the calendar in 1582, based on a proposal by astronomer Aloysius Lilius. Gregory changed the number of leap years per most centuries to 97 instead of 100, by not having an extra day on centuries not divisible by 400. 1900 and 2100 will not have February 29th, but 2000 did.
In addition, for the people of Pope Gregory’s time, to make this calendar work for the future, he realized that 10 days had to be thrown out of that calendar year: October 4th was immediately followed by October 15th. You can imagine how those who “lost” a birthday that year must have felt. However, this change was adopted very quickly by all of the European Catholic countries.
Those countries that weren’t Catholic, however, kept to the Old Calendar for many years. Included in them were Great Britain and its American colonies; however, by the time they went on to the new system, an 11th day had to be lost to conform to the Gregorian calendar. This came up recently in reading one of the old “Believe It or Not” book series, which explained why the Father of our Country, George Washington, was not really born on February 22nd, as we have always believed; in fact, he was born during the time of the old calendar, on February 11th. That would place his actual birthday the day before Abraham Lincoln’s, whose February 12th conformed to the new style.
As this year is divisible by four, let’s all celebrate February 29th, and thank Pope Gregory for fixing the calendar such that it will be a few centuries before another correction must be made. And, if you’re going outside in the mornings now, be happy that you can look up and enjoy watching the motions of the planets for an extra day this year.
