Momentary Magic: Leap Day!

In fact, Leap Day is a very fleeting kind of magic.  It only last 24 hours, once every 4 years.

I recently heard someone talking on a local radio station about doing away with leap day.  Not only that, but he seemed to think it would be a very good idea to divide the calendar evenly so that the first day of each month always fell on the same day, and we would never need new calendars.  He must have realized that in order to have such symmetry you could only have 364 days in each year, because he concluded with the idea that we could even everything out by having a leap week every few years.  So that would be 13 months of 28 days with a “leap week” every seven years?  You would still need that special calendar every 7th year, the one with the extra week in it.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but that would mean the days we mark as seasonal observances, such as solstices and equinoxes would still occur, only on different days, each year as we would continue to lose a day out of every year.  Perhaps we could ask the earth to orbit the sun faster instead of taking 365.24 (approximately, and I’m rounding down) days in which to make this journey.

No.  I love leap year.  I love that we’ve created this special day that only “exists” every 4 years.  To me it is a magical doorway.  One that leads to Imagi Nation.  I would never want to see us do away with it just to make a tidier row of boxes on a calendar.