Leap Day Gives Candidates One Extra Day to Campaign

Did you know that the purpose of Leap Year is to keep our calendar in alignment with the earth’s revolutions around the sun? I had no idea. I always thought Leap Day was there to give presidential candidates an extra day to campaign.

Apparently, the solar year, the time required for the sun to make one complete cycle of the seasons, is 365 days, 5 hours, 49 minutes, and 19 seconds, though during presidential election years, it seems a lot longer.

You see the problem. We start every new year 5 hours, 49 minutes, and 19 seconds too early. That’s how we are; always in a hurry. If we didn’t throw in a Leap Day every four years, the calendar would be 24 days ahead of the season a hundred years from now. The leaves would still be on the ground when the calendar was calling for snow shovels–just like now.  But the snowbirds would be coming back from Arizona during spring blizzards. Boy I’d like to be around to see that.

In order to stay on track, we add that extra day in February every four years. Even this is not a perfect solution, because 5 hours, 49 minutes, and 19 seconds times four equals…well, I don’t know what it equals. But I know it doesn’t equal a full day. So the calendar people, whoever they are, have to do some further adjusting. This is too complicated for me to get in to, mainly because I don’t understand it. But suffice it to say, 2100 and 2200 will NOT be Leap Years, even though they’re divisible by four. Lucky! No extra day for campaigning those years. Too bad we’ll probably miss that!

Pope Gregory XIII is responsible for the creation of the calendar, though I think he may have had help from Hallmark and the Mayans. But Pope Gregory is long gone. So I want to know who’s keeping the calendar up to date now, because I’m not. Somebody somewhere is making sure that extra day gets added every four years, and I want to know who they are and how I can reach them, because I have some questions.

For starters, if you’re going to add an extra day to the calendar, why one earth would you do it during an election year? And in February? That’s just mean. I know it’s the shortest month of the year, but there’s a very good reason for that! Nobody wants more February, except for ski resort operators and people in the southern hemisphere, and they can have it.

And another thing! According to my extensive research, Leap Day is more likely to occur on a Monday or Wednesday than on any other day. What kind of person arranges the calendar to give us more Mondays?

Nevertheless, I do appreciate the extra day every four years–even if it is during an election year, more often on a Monday, and during the dead of winter. I haven’t decided what I’m going to do with it yet, but I’ll probably spend it catching up. Maybe on February 29, I’ll get all my photos in albums, organize the filing cabinet, and clean that layer of greasy dust off the top of my kitchen cupboards. Those are the kind of things I don’t get done in 365 days. And if I don’t get them done on Leap Day, they’re the kinds of things that can wait another four year.

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