Leap Year on Yῑbǎihàu

The earth celebrates leap year every four years because its orbit of the sun is not precisely 365 days. It’s more like 365.25 days, If your name is Egypt, you solve the problem by having 12 months of 30 days each then a 5 day holiday period. The seasons are going to slip on this calendar but the Egyptians didn’t care. Every three hundred years, what was winter on their calendar now became spring and so on but they knew that. They named their months so that it didn’t matter if was summer or spring.
Gregory and the Catholics did care. They needed Easter to be in the Spring, every year. Gregory and his advisors made this so by inventing Leap Year.
The astronomers on Yῑbǎihàu demonstrated comparable competence. By the time of their discovery by Hegemony scouts, they had calculated their planet’s orbit as 423.01 days. They understood this meant that every 100 years their calendars would be wrong by one day and ever millennium it would be by 10 days and every 10 millennia they’d have a problem similar to Earth’s. Accordingly, every century, an additional day was added to the calendar.
The astronomers envisioned this day as a holiday. It only happened once a century and that made it noteworthy. Noteworthy days should be celebrated otherwise what is the point of noteworthy days.
The astronomers, though, led a precarious existence. If it was not for their ability to correctly predict the first day of spring, they’d have been put out of business as a “bilking of the populace.” Who needs people who stay up all night gazing at stars? The priests did - for the sole purpose of predicting the first day of spring for conduct of the annual fertility rite.
The astronomers forgot to mention the concept of a calendar to the priests. What the priests didn’t know couldn’t hurt them, could it? And, what the heck, they got their fertility festival right on schedule. Must have been difficult for the priests knowing that was the only day of the year they could get laid.
The addition of another day in the year, from the priests’ perspective, simply added another day between their…religious duties. That was certainly no cause for celebration. In fact, what it was was a cause for more prayer. The entire population spent the day in prayer. They prayed for good weather, good crops, good priests. They prayed for forgiveness of their sins. They prayed for a better world free of dispute and all other manner of ugliness. The final prayer of the day was a prayer of thanksgiving. All the priests led all the people thanking the Goddess that this extra day happened only once in a century.

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