Frogs For Lunch: Leap Year

I was almost going to let this month get away without another post. And then I looked at the calendar this afternoon as I was about to turn to a new month, and realized that there was one more day in it. Yes. Leap Day. I started this blog in 2009, and since the year before was a leap year, I certainly didn't want to wait until 2016 to take this opportunity again.

Leap Day. When we catch up to all of the hours that were won and lost between daylight and central time changes. Ha, Ha ... not really. Actually, it's to make up for the earth's natural tendency to be too late or too early for everything in it's yearly orbit around the planet of Uranus.

Being naturally curious about human society, I spent some time on the internets this afternoon to see if hu-mans had any special way that they celebrated the day. I found that more than a lot of people who were born on this day firmly believe they are 25 just because they were born on the 29th of February, even though they are actually 100 years old. They're also pissed because they only get birthday presents every four years.

But, that wasn't really all that interesting. What is interesting ... is that once upon a time way back when in the turn of the last, last century ... about 1900 or so, Leap Day was the one time where a woman could ask a man to marry them and not be faced with being stoned to death by a crowd of over-excited Flappers.

And I actually found some Leap Day Cards from that era. Seems that most men at that time DID NOT want to get married. And that most women from that era DID WANT to get married.

What a silly time.

The Leap Day/Women Proposing to Men thing kind of reminded of me of when I was in high school and we were supposed to have a Sadie Hawkins Day Dance, where the girls ask the boys out ... but we didn't because the local paper had canceled the newspaper comic Lil' Abner before we could read and we didn't realize there WAS such a thing as Sadie Hawkins Day, and missed the chance to have a really cool dance where the girls asked the boys out.

Such is life.

Anyway, I ran across some greeting cards that celebrate a woman's quest for a man's hand in marriage on Leap Day. I don't know exactly WHO would have sent these to WHO, but supposedly, they were second in sales only to the most popular sympathy card of the day that featured a burning barn and the message inside read "So sorry you're barn burned down during the night and incinerated your horse, two cows and 15 chickens". And here they are: