azureabstraction > out of the blue

Happy Leap Day!

To celebrate the Leap Day today, I finished a book and read three more. But for you, I will share something I read on Steven Brust's online journal:

Leap Day has a tradition going far, far back in time. In ancient Sumeria, it was considered a day for taking chances–for doing things normally considered too risky, such as entering a hitherto unexplored cave, descending a steep cliff, or making wisecracks to airport security. The Aztecs celebrated leap day with drunken revelry and corset piercings. To the Hunnish tribes, it was a day for telling long jokes that always ended, “That’s what the horse said.” The ancient Celts saw it a time when the barriers to faerie were thin, so they would engage in religious rites at stone circles in which they would ask the gods to please give them a better calender. The magyars saw it as a day for eating fine food and having wild, abandoned sex–in other words, they didn’t take particular note of it.

Today, our celebrations are more sedate, and we usually use it as an opportunity to make fun of a certain class of neo-pagan and for making things up out of whole cloth.

A note for Cami, Paul, and possibly Aaron: You should apply your grains of salt right about now.

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