For all the persons born on the 29th of February, I have a proposition. What if, instead of dropping your day off the map, we dropped another day?
Think of it this way: your birthday is missing from the calendar for three year increments, then every fourth year it returns—but it doesn’t have to be. February 29th is just the day someone picked long ago.
What we could do instead is to remove a different day from the year on those in-between years, and we could start with any day you want. How about George Washington’s birthday? He’s passed on, so he won’t miss it.
Or, of course we could just go in order and have next year be missing March 1st. Then the next year March 2nd, and so on.
That kind of middle-of-the-month day removal could get confusing to some people. “Wait, yesterday it was the 19th and now it’s the 21st? What happened?”
No worries. It will be just fine. In fact, you can be the ambassador for the change and help console those poor people who don’t understand when the calendar is missing a specific day. Tell them it’s the new leap day. Tell them how the calendar requires minor adjustments every so often because Earth’s orbit doesn’t perfectly fit into a 365 day cycle. Tell them how the seasons would be off if we didn’t. Tell them how other major adjustments have to be made, such as having to choose between two other days on the calendar to celebrate your birth.
So, what we’ll do instead is we’ll keep the 29th of February for about 486 years, removing a different day each year, except leap years because we’ll be keeping leap years as the only years with all the calendar days.
Simple, right?
Happy Birthday!
Xenosthesia.com 