February

Februarius was, with January, one of the two months Roman tradition says King Numa added to close the winter gap of the old ten month year, and it long stood last in the Roman year rather than second. Its name comes from the februa, the strips, branches and other instruments of purification used in the month's rites; Ovid opens the second book of the Fasti with exactly this explanation, deriving the month from the act of cleansing that prepared the community for the year that began in March. The Lupercalia of the fifteenth of February, when the luperci ran their circuit striking bystanders with goatskin thongs, was the most famous of these purifications, and the Parentalia in the middle of the month turned the same instinct toward the family dead, honoured at their tombs with offerings.

February's shortness and its leap day are both Roman inheritances. As the final month of the old year it absorbed the arithmetic left over by the others, and the Roman intercalary month, when the priests inserted one, was spliced into late February; Julius Caesar's reform of 46 BCE replaced that clumsy device with a single day added every fourth year in the same place. The Gregorian reform of 1582, promulgated by Pope Gregory XIII, kept February's leap day but skips it in three century years out of four, the adjustment that still holds the calendar to the sun.

Only when the first of January became the civil new year did February become the second month rather than the last, a reordering already settled by the late Roman Republic.

Sources FastiOvid with The Oxford Companion to the Year: An Exploration of Calendar Customs and Time-ReckoningBonnie Blackburn and Leofranc Holford-Strevens

The second of February falls forty days after Christmas, and on it the Western churches keep Candlemas, the feast of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple and the purification of Mary, marked by the blessing of the year's candles. The date drew older associations around it: the Gaelic festival of Imbolc, kept on the first and second of February, greeted the first stirrings of spring, the lactation of the ewes, and Brigid, goddess and later saint, whose woven rush crosses are still made in Ireland at the start of the month. Modern Pagans keep Imbolc as one of the eight festivals of the Wheel of the Year, and North American folk custom preserves a distant echo of the same weather watching threshold in Groundhog Day.

Marian devotion returns later in the month at Our Lady of Lourdes on the eleventh of February, commemorating the apparitions reported by Bernadette Soubirous in 1858, a date the Catholic Church also keeps as the World Day of the Sick. Because Easter most often falls in late March or April, Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent frequently arrive in February, so the month's old purification theme survives inside the Christian year as the opening of the fast, with Shrove Tuesday pancakes and Carnival as the last feast before it.

In a leap year the intercalary day falls at the month's end, and the medieval church, counting a doubled sixth day before the Kalends of March in the Roman manner, gave English the word bissextile for such years.

Sources The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised editionF. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.) with Celtic Culture: A Historical EncyclopediaJohn T. Koch (ed.), The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan WitchcraftRonald Hutton