Ok, so it’s February.

While January has all the momentum of a sled on an icy toboggan hill – What? January’s done? – February comes in and sits, immoveable, like a four-foot-high snowdrift in front of your garage door. It’s hard to get going anywhere and it really feels like a lot of work.

“Well,” I thought to myself this morning as I surveyed the -35 degrees Celcius landscape out my window, “at least it’s a short month.” Not that weather is any respecter of Gregorian calendar lines – I got married the day after a snowstorm in August in Alberta. Oh, Alberta.

But then I got to wondering: just why IS February only 28 days (usually)? I mean, there’s a whole seven other months that have an EXTRA day and here poor old February is missing two. Did February miss a couple turns when picking teams on the celestial playground? Oh, February.

And so, I went down a short World Wide Web Wormhole, quickly realizing that there really is no rational answer. February (along with January) wasn’t even a thing until a Roman guy named Numa first corrected the old lunar ten-month calendar. He tried (unsuccessfully) to avoid having any months with an “unlucky” even number. He had 355 days to work with, so one month had to have an even number of days. (Which lends credence to the myth of Why February Feels Unlucky.)

One would think that when Julius Caesar decided to “fix” things, adding in the lost 10 days (they USED to add a LEAP MONTH every four years to rectify things) that he would just shuffle the deck and a bunch of 30s and 31s would be dealt out. But no, he didn’t want to mess with the existing 31s. He did, however, give February 29. And he renamed one of the months in middle after himself. (As “luck” would have it, Julius Caesar was murdered shortly after in the month of March, which was shortly after the now “lucky” February.)

This changed as soon his adopted son Augustus was in charge. As emperors will do, he decided that HE needed a month named after him, too, so whatever August used to be called was renamed for him. But since he had to be even-stevens with his dad, he stole a day FROM FEBRUARY to give his month 31. Oh, Augustus.

This begs the question: are people who are born on February 29 lucky? (They age a lot slower.) Or unlucky? (They don’t get as many birthday cakes.)

I’ll just let you think about that.