Germanic calendar inspired by the Julian calendar, introduced a purely solar reckoning with a year having a fixed number of weeks (52 weeks or 364 days). This necessitated the introduction of "leap weeks" instead of Julian leap days. The old Icelandic calendar is not in official use any more, but some Icelandic holidays and annual feasts are still calculated from it. It has 12 months, of 30 days broken down into two groups of six often termed "winter months" and "summer months". The calendar is peculiar in that each month always start on the same day of week. This was achieved by
February 29 by omitting several days, and to reduce the number of leap years via the "century rule" to keep the equinoxes more or less fixed and the date of Easter consistently close to the vernal equinox. Although most modern calendar years have 365 days, a complete revolution around the Sun (one solar year) takes approximately 365 days and 6 hours. An extra 24 hours thus accumulates every four years, requiring that an extra calendar day be added to align the calendar with the Sun's apparent position. Without the added day, in future years the seasons would occur later in the calendar,