Extra time on your hands – we get an bonus day this month

THE WOODLANDS, TX – For those of you who question Einstein’s stance that time is subjective, society has three shining examples that prove we can warp and bend time to our will. First, the length of a minute can vary wildly depending on which side of a closed bathroom door you’re on. Second, we still ‘celebrate’ Daylight Saving Time decades after it outlived its usefulness. And third is the semi-regular Leap Year.

Long story short, every four years that fit into a certain equation (more on that later) we need to add a day to sync up Earth’s revolution around the sun with our own clocks. It actually takes a tad more than 365 days to complete a solar year – by about six hours – and without a sporadic reset we’d eventually end up with winter in July within a few centuries.

Way back in the olden days, before Julius Caesar took over the Roman Empire around 45 BC, no one had a set way of figuring out how to realign the time discrepancies; in fact, the early Romans seem to have lived with a calendar that only had ten months in it, plus an undefined length of off-the-books winter. Over time, January and February were added to fill in the gap, plus an inserted ‘intercalary’ month, Mercedonius.

Caesar is the one who came up with the idea of adding a day every four years – thereby creating the ‘Julian’ calendar named after him, but about 600 years later it was determined that this setup had added to a 10-day discrepancy between solar and calendar year.

Enter Pope Gregory XIII, who rejiggered the formula in 1582 by creating February 29 that would be observed every four years but only when the year in question is divisible by 400. If you want to avoid doing math in your head, 2004, 2008, 2012, 2016 were all Leap Years; 2000 was a Leap Year, but 1900 wasn’t and 2100 won’t be, either. If you’re just aching to be armed with an icebreaker, the Leap Years lined up for the rest of the century in our currently observed Gregorian calendar will be 2036, 2040, 2044, 2048, 2052, 2056, 2060, 2064, 2068, 2072, 2076, 2080, 2084, 2088, 2092, and 2096.

Leap Year has a special significance for the small town of Anthony here in Texas. Anthony, situated about spitting distance from the New Mexico border, bills itself as the ‘Leap Year Capital of the World’ thanks to a celebration set up by two ‘leapers’ in 1988 to celebrate everyone born on a Leap Day. Now, each February 29, Anthony holds a four-day festival and birthday celebration for all Leap Year babies, drawing crowds from all over the world to take part in parades, birthday celebrations, and hot air balloon rides.

Finally, unlike the quandary postulated by ‘The Pirates of Penzance,’ people born on a Leap Day can choose to celebrate their birthdays on either February 28 or March 1 (and have them legally recognized on the latter day), meaning they’re eligible to get their driver’s license, vote, or age out of their piracy apprenticeship on a normal schedule.