Morning, boyos. Happy day of leaping.
And Happy Sadie Hawkins Day as well!
There seems to be some disagreement on the date, according to my quick Google search to find out what Sadie Hawkins Day was:
The date for Sadie Hawkins Day most commonly reported is November 13, two days before the first appearance in the comics. The date has on occasion been confused for February 29 (Leap Day), the date for Bachelor's Day according to the original Irish tradition of women being allowed to propose marriage.
Al Capp finally set the date for Sadie Hawkins Day as November 26, in his last Li'l Abner daily strip on November 5, 1977.
I've always heard it as both the date in November and today. They were usually February dances.
And a bit more information than you ever needed...
Leap Days are to account for Earth completing one full revolution around the sun about every 365.25 days. Thus, we add one day to the calendar every four years in February, giving us Feb. 29.
However, Earth doesn't complete a single trip around the sun every 365.25 days. It's actually every 365.242181 days. Thus, adding a Leap Day actually adds slightly too much time to the calendar to be accurate.
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Leap Days were first introduced in ancient Roman times in 45 B.C. with the Julian calendar. They were the first ones to add an extra day to February every four years. But over time, that slight misalignment compounded and meant the Julian calendar wasn't aligned perfectly with Earth's orbit.
In 1582, the Catholic Church wanted to correct this mistake by adjusting the calendar. By then, the calendar was off by 10 days from Earth's orbit. So, on Oct. 4, 1582, Pope Gregory XIII declared that the next day would be Oct. 15, 1582 to account for that gap.
The Gregorian Calendar, as it came to be known, (and the current calendar we use today) also added the rule for Leap Days that said that we have to skip three Leap Days every 400 years. This was to account for it being 365.242181 days instead of 365.25. If a year is divisible by 100, but not by 400, we skip a Leap Day that year.
Thus, it looks like this: Skip Leap Day in 1700, 1800, 1900, but not in 2000, then go back to skipping Leap Day in 2100, 2200 and 2300.
If, when the United States was founded in 1776, we decided to abolish Leap Days, we would be exactly two months ahead (60 days) of where we should be on the calendar. That would mean today's date would be April 29 instead of Feb. 29.
