Leaping Out of Secular Time

Today is “Leap Day,” a curio of calendrical planning.

There is actually more to the day than one might expect. Some of February 29th’s oft-forgotten ‘traditions,’ particularly those relating to marriage, are of genuine origin and have left an interesting, albeit slightly obscure, cultural legacy. As  L. V. Anderson writes on Slate :

A hundred years ago, it was common knowledge in America that women were allowed to propose to men during leap years. (Most believed that the reversal held for the entire year, though proposal mania usually peaked in January and February.) The exact origins of the tradition are murky; one myth traces the tradition to an agreement between St. Patrick and St. Bridget in the fifth century, while another purports that Queen Margaret of Scotland instituted a law fining men who said no to a woman who proposed on leap day. Both of these origin stories are highly unlikely; the tradition didn’t enter the cultural lexicon until the 18 ^th  century and didn’t really catch on until the early 20 ^th  century.

Aside from this, it’s mildly amusing to witness contemporary popular culture’s attempt to fashion some sort of special event out of what essentially amounts to another day. Part of the excitement, though, undoubtedly results from the fact that today is a quirk, an irregularity in our otherwise fine-tuned notion of secular time. Like the prevalence of popular music celebrating Friday nights, or our annual New Years’ Eve rituals, the substitution of chronos in place of kairos leaves us wanting markers of a ‘higher’ calendar to break in.