Today is the added day for Leap Year, February 29. Once every four years we get an extra day in the year. Consider it a bonus. Treat it like a gift!
Bonus day
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Lucas Cranach, self portrait c.1530.
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Since the year is approximately 365.242190 days long, it’s that we finally get the extra day that has been accumulating over the past three years. It’s sort of like the extra hour of daylight saving time you lose in springtime and get back in the fall.
“Once every four years we get an extra day in the year. Consider it a bonus. Treat it like a gift!”
What about the year 2100? We won’t get a leap year that year. We will be deprived of the gift
“Treat it as a gift.”
If I had the day off…ya.
I just wonder who will invite me to the dance. I’m so excited!
Carl – interesting factoid: We here in Saskatchewan are the only major jurisdiction on this contient not to observe daylight savings…
KK, I think you missed Arizona.
Arizona and Saskatchewan are the only sensible jurisdictions in North America.
BTW. We have 365 days a year, except for every 4 years we have an extra day (a leap year), except for every 100 years we don’t, except for every 400 years we don’t don’t. Make sense?
The year 2000 was a leap year. But not because it was a normal leap year. It was an exception to the exception to the exception…
Today is also the day to remember Sir Patrick Hamilton, the first Lutheran martyr of Scotland, who was executed by burning outside of St. Andrews’ in Edinburgh on February 29, 1528. A 24-year-old Wittenberg-trained professor, he authored “St. Patrick’s Places,” a confession of faith for which ultimately he was put on trial (as well as for his teaching of the Lutheran “heresy” as a professor at St. Andrews). During his trial, he said: “I will not deny it [the Lutheran confession]. I will rather be content that my body burn in this fire for confession of my faith in Christ than my soul should burn in the fire of hell for denying [it].”
While his accusers were reviling him during his execution, he challenged them to proclaim the truth of their confession of faith by daring to put one finger into the flame in which his whole body was burning. Witnesses to his execution included his wife and his daughter Isabel. His conviction helped to persuade one of his former opponents, Alexander Alane, who became a Lutheran and was highly valued by Philip Melanchthon, who nicknamed him “Alesius,” or “Wanderer.”
Here is an excerpt from “Patrick’s Places”:
“What is this, to say Christ died for you? Truly, that you should have died eternally, and Christ, to deliver you from death died for you, and changed your eternal death into His own death; for you made the fault, and He suffered the punishment, and that for the love He had to you before you were born. Oh! How ready would we be to help others if we knew His goodness and gentleness toward us. Let us, I beseech you, therefore follow His footsteps, whom all the world ought to praise and worship. Amen.”
Rev. Jerry Gernander (ELS)
Princeton, Minnesota
Ah, that would explain why many SK snowbirds (as they are called) pick Arizona!
I stand corrected…
I read an article in our local paper yesterday (Orange County Register) about a local family with a brother and sister both born on different leap days. The brother was born in 1960 and the sister was born in 1964 — both entirely natural births.
I guess it’s bound to happen if the sample size is large enough, but that’s still pretty amazing.
I have the day off
But I’d rather have Friday off.
Sometimes Dr. Veith can be so sappy. Man’s attempt to measure things that are irregular is such a commonplace. Meh.
Sappy, Joanne? SAPPY? What else can we measure but what is, at some level, irregular? And what’s wrong with things that are commonplace?
All in Branson MO and Harrisbug IL will not soon forget the date. Feb 29 2012. The year their towns were ripped apart by tornadoes.
http://barnabas.lcmsworldmission.org/?p=1313
http://jme.bmj.com/content/early/2012/02/22/medethics-2011-100411.full
Rev. Gernander,
Thank you for your post.
I’d like to read more — can you reveal your source?
Thanks.
Bob,
I don’t have it at hand at the moment, but there was an article in Logia and also (I believe) in the Lutheran Synod Quarterly (archives of which are available at blts.edu), and I think both were written by Bruce Wilmot Adams. Also, if you look back to St. Patrick’s Day a year ago, at the cyberbrethren site Rev. Paul McCain included a longish article by N.S. Tjernagel on Sir Patrick Hamilton and Alexander Alane; however it lacked attribution for what the original article was, and when and where it was published. Additionally, William Dallmann — that indefatigable LCMS writer of church history biographies — wrote a short book on Hamilton back in the 1940s or 50s. Perhaps you could find it in a confessional Lutheran college or seminary library near you.