Let's Just Get Rid of February

I wrote about the horrors of February three years ago. It's my most-highly read column, because every winter I get hundreds of new page hits from the search phrase "I hate February." Sadly, that fact has not impressed anyone enough to fix the underlying problems with the month.


So I'm going to do keep complaining about it.



February is the worst month of year and it isn't even close.

The weather is cold, the days are short, it doesn't contain a real holiday, and nothing interesting happens in it other than the Super Bowl, which almost always disappoints with boring football and uninspired commercials. And don't even get me started about Valentine's Day.

Other months are bad too, but none quite so much as February. January is too cold, and August is too hot.  But January at least has two holidays, the NFL playoffs, and the tail end of the holiday season. August, has lots of daylight in its favor, and no begrudges you a summer vacation if you just can't take the brutal heat.
In February, your boss still expects you to work extra to compensate for the lost productivity of the holiday season, and it's too cold to go anywhere anyway.

February has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. And as I type this I'm reminded that February sucks for an additional reason: it is wayyyyyyy too hard to spell. It has that unnecessary and largely unpronounced "r" as its fourth letter, inserted just to spite all of us. We can't even write about it without it causing aggravation.

Honestly, the month's only redeeming factor is that it only has 28 days. Whoever decided that the rest of the months should have 30 or 31, while February was so awful it should be limited to 28, obviously realized how horrible this month is. But they didn't do enough to stop it from coming back.

Even when it passes, we all know it will still be out there, lurking, laughing under its cold wintery breath until it returns in early 2015.

So I suggest we go a step further than making February the shortest month of the year: we should eliminate it altogether. Really, wouldn't the world be a much better place if we had 11 months with 33 or 34 days each and just got rid of February?

Or we could skip from January to March.
I'm sure some old grouch out there would argue that if we skipped February, March would suddenly just take its place as the month filled with cold weather and short days, and it would be just as bad. But that's ridiculous.  March is much easier to spell.

Besides, I'm pretty sure the skeptics are wrong, but even if by some weird stretch of logic they happened to win on a technicality, we could still solve the problem another way. We could just add 28 days to January. It would make for a really long month, but at least there would be something to look forward to at the end.
As it stands, finishing a month of brutal January cold only to be rewarded with February is small consolation.
We should just get rid of February instead.

And let's get rid of that unnecessary first "R" while we're at it.