Leap Day legend, lore and how Feb 29 squeezed its way into your calendar baltimoresun.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from baltimoresun.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
For more than 500 years, the most popular and influential book after the Bible was
The Golden Legend by Jacobus de Varagine. At the end of the 13th century, Varagine was grappling with how medieval Christians perceived time: He mapped the liturgical calendar and the stories of feast-day Saints associated with it.
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Flash forward to today. We now waste a great deal of time fumbling around with the flawed Gregorian calendar. For one thing, new calendars have to be printed every year. What a waste of both time and money.
But this isn’t the only cost dished up by our Gregorian calendar: The scheduling of holidays, sporting events, and school curricula to name but a few must be redone each year. The Gregorian calendar also causes confusion when it comes to the age-old idea of “time is money.” For example, a wide variety of financial instruments bonds, mortgages, swaps, forward rate agreements, etc. accrue interest by the day. The current calendar contains c