2020 is a unique year. It’s a leap year, an election year (don’t forget to vote), and it also marks 20 years of Natalie defining sustainability (among many more good things to come).
We continue to celebrate sustainability with the reintroduction of The Poncho, one of Alabama Chanin’s best-selling accessories.
Developed in the early years of the company, The Poncho was retired in 2017. Our database lists 6,484 ponchos though we know many more were made before the official system was in place.
The Poncho is available now through Monday in anticipation of the coming transition from one season to the next. Our commitment to sustainability means that your poncho will last for many (leap) years to come. Let the cosmos align.
Shop the poncho here and learn about the history of the leap year below:
We’ve always been taught that a year is 365 days long; that’s how long it takes for the Earth to make one rotation around the sun. But, that’s not exactly correct. The actual length of time it takes is 365.24219 days. While that might sound insignificant, it throws a kink into things where our calendar is concerned. That small difference means that we experience a six-hour time loss every calendar year. That’s a 24-day shift per century.
Early Romans reportedly followed an approximate 355-day calendar (we’re not entirely sure of their measurements) to make certain holidays and important festivals fall around the same time each season. To do that, they added an extra 22 or 23 day month to each calendar, every second year. Because that was a rather unorganized way to keep time, in 45 BC Julius Caesar tried to restructure the calendar to make things simpler. He created what is called the Julian calendar, inspired by the Egyptian solar calendar, which was based around observation of the stars. To achieve the same sort of regularity that Egypt had, he added an extra 24 hours to February (known as a leap day) every four years and that kept the seasons relatively aligned.
In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII invented the Gregorian calendar, which corrected some of Caesar’s time calculations. Because the Julian calendar was still just a little off, the date of Easter was continually drifting away from its traditional day of observance. The pope commissioned a new calendar that kept the idea of Caesar’s Leap Day, but made an exception that three leap days are omitted every 400 years. Because time is now more closely aligned with Earth’s actual rotation, it will take over 3,000 years for our calendar to add one additional day.