It is true! There was once a year which had 445 days in it and one which only had 354 days.
All these variations have occurred as attempts have been made to keep the calendar year in line with the solar or astronomical year. Adjustments, like the leap year, need to be made because the normal or common year of 365 days is not quite the same as the solar year, the time it takes for the Earth to make one complete revolution round the Sun.
The difference between the two is nearly 6 hours. To be precise, it takes the Earth 365 days 5 hours 49 minutes and 12 seconds to make one orbit round the Sun. As this approximates to 365 and ¼ days, we add 1 day to February every 4 years, giving us February 29th, in order to catch up.
Because the old Roman calendar had no such refinement, the calendar year and the solar year had got so far out of step that Julius Caesar consulted the astronomer Sosigenes of Alexandria. He devised a calendar very much like our own, with leap years every 4 years. Julius Caesar ordered it to begin to be used in 45BC, hence its title the Julian calendar. However, in order for it to work properly, the previous year, 46BC, had to be 445 days long. So the people in the Roman Empire had an extra long year, which became known as ‘the last year of confusion.’
The Julian calendar was not perfect. Based on a year of 365 and ¼ days, it made ,the year about 11 minutes longer than the solar year. With a leap day added every fourth year, the calendar gained 3 days every 4 centuries. This may not sound a lot but, by the 16th century, it was giving the Church problems in fixing the date of Easter. So the system was revised and, by order of Pope Gregory XIII, the Gregorian calendar, the one which is generally used today, was introduced in 1582. The major difference with the Julian calendar is that century years are only leap years if they can be divided by 400. Consequently, compared to the Julian calendar, the Gregorian calendar drops 3 leap year days (leap days) in every 400 years, keeping us very close to the pattern of solar years.
To get the new Gregorian calendar to start correctly when it was introduced in 1582, 10 days were cut from the calendar. However, Britain did not change from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar until 1752, so it meant that 11 days had to be cut, giving a year of only 354 days. We went from Wednesday 2nd September to Thursday 14th September. Some people rioted, demanding to be given back the 11 days as they thought their lives were being cut short by that amount.
But, as Abraham Lincoln said, ‘In the end, it’s not the years in your life that count, it’s the life in your years.’ Or, as John Wesley put it, ‘Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.’ Then, it doesn’t really matter how long the year is!