Leap Day Cocktails Lost to Time

Feb. 29 still comes once every four years, but celebratory cocktails marking the bissextile have gone out of fashion—along with a leap-year tradition that requires plenty of liquid courage, Eric Felten notes in the Wall Street Journal. Women who proposed marriage during the leap year could not be denied; little wonder desperate lasses were expected to sport scarlet petticoats.

The women's liberation movement eventually helped squash the Sadie Hawkins tradition, and the fortifying beverages of times past—whiskey over green ice cubes, a variety of gin concoctions—haven’t been in vogue since the 1970s. That might not be a terrible loss, given the recipe Felten gives for the Leap Year Dreamsicle: vodka, orange juice, and vanilla ice cream. (More leap year stories.)