History | Time | Calendars
February 30
If you were living in Sweden in 1712, today would be February 30.
Why?
I’m glad you asked.
It turns out that up until the 1700s, Sweden was still using the old Julian calendar and decided it wanted to switch to the more “modern” Gregorian calendar.
The problem was that to do so, it needed an extra day.
1712 was a Leap Year, so what better time to slip in an extra day?
When March 1, 1712, rolled around, behold, Sweden was on the same calendar as the rest of Western Europe.
The Swedes weren’t the only ones to fiddle with the number of days in February.
The Soviet Union, in an attempt to change the calendar to consist of months with 6 weeks of 5 days each, with no weekends or days off, increased February to a 30-day month in 1930 and1931.
This plan was abandoned and the USSR officially went back to the Gregorian calendar, conceding that no one in the country ever paid attention to the new calendar and had continued taking Sundays off.
The website I gleened this info about these calendar oddities is
