If the man refuses a proposal from a woman, he is obligated to buy the woman a gift.
The official leap day cocktail
• 1 dash lemon juice
• 2/3 gin
• 1/6 Grand Marnier
• 1/6 sweet Vermouth
Shake, garnish with a lemon peel, serve and enjoy the flood of bittersweet flavours
Fun Facts you may not have known about leap day
One solar year (that is, the amount of time it takes our planet to accomplish one full rotation around the sun) takes roughly 365 days, five hours, 48 minutes, and 46 seconds.
That extra five-or-so hours nobody likes to talk about are precisely why we have leap year!
The 366-day years that occur every four years encourage women to propose to men, and make celebrating birthdays very confusing for those born on leap day.
Here are some reasons leap day is even more special than you think.
How do you remember if it’s a leap year?
Simple: If the last two digits of the year are divisible by four (e.g. 2016, 2020, 2024…) then it’s a leap year.
Century years are the exception to this rule. They must be divisible by 400 to be leap years, so, 2000 and 2400 are leap years, but 2100 will not be one. As a bonus, US leap years almost always coincide with election years.
What’s crazier than February 29th?
A woman proposing to a man, says history.
You’re not the only one who thinks leap years are silly.
After Pope Gregory XIII instituted the Gregorian calendar in 1582, the idea of adding February 29 every four years seemed so ridiculous that a British play joked it was a day when women should trade their dresses for “breeches” and act like men.
The play was meant as satire, but some early feminists must have been inspired; by the 1700s women were using leap day to propose to the men in their lives.
The tradition, now called Bachelor’s Day or Sadie Hawkins Day, peaked in the early 1900s and continues today in the UK, where some retailers even offer discount packages to women popping the question.
If the man refuses, he then is obliged to give the woman money or buy her a dress.
In upper-class societies in Europe, if the man refuses marriage, he then must purchase 12 pairs of gloves for the woman, suggesting that the gloves are to hide the woman’s embarrassment of not having an engagement ring.
The rule: Leap day happens every four years unless it doesn’t do the trick.
The point of leap years is to help adjust our Gregorian calendar (aka, the 365-day calendar you can find on your desk or phone) to the solar calendar, and make sure we celebrate solar events like the spring and autumn equinoxes with some regularity every year.
Even adding an extra day to February every four years doesn’t quite do the trick, which is why scientists sometimes call for a leap second like they did in 2015 on June 30 at 11:59:60 pm.
