Thursday marks leap day! Feb. 29 is the rare day that comes up on the calendar every four years.
For many, it might just be another day, but about five million people around the world — also known as leaplings — will get to celebrate their actual birthday and others will celebrate a special moment like an anniversary.
But where does this extra day come from?
Jean Creighton, the director of the Manfred Olson Planetarium at UW-Milwaukee, says it takes the Earth 365.25 days to go around the sun. Although a quarter day doesn’t seem like much, we make up for that extra time with a leap day about every four years.
“If you don't make these adjustments, then what you call the beginning of the year is going to fall in different seasons, which for most people around the world was not acceptable,” Creighton says.
If we were to forgo leap years entirely, Creighton says the lunar calendar, which is based on the moon’s movement around the sun, reveals what that might look like. She says some cultures that strictly follow the lunar calendar celebrate holidays in whichever season they take place.
“So for example, the Muslim calendar is strictly lunar, which means that if you add the full moons in the year, 12 full moons every year, you're gonna be 11 days short from the full solar year. So over time, your celebrations are going to literally slip into different seasons,” Creighton says.
“You might have noticed that Ramadan can be any day of the year, and I think that's principally because of where Islam started. Relatively near the equator, the seasons aren't that pronounced. So whether Ramadan is in February or August it makes very little difference," she explains. "But in religions in parts of the world where there's a very noticeable difference in the length of the day at different times of the year, it was more important [to them] to align the beginning of the year with a certain season.”
What does leap day mean for birthdays and special anniversaries?
For husband and wife Aaron Arcello and Anna Floch Arcello, Feb. 29 means they get to celebrate each other’s birthday! Both Aaron and Anna were born on Feb. 29, 1984, in different states about 12 hours apart.
But their love story started in New York City when a friend introduced these leaplings to each other at a party.
“I was really taken aback because I mean, it's kind of rare to have somebody you meet to have a leap birthday, and he was really cute,” Anna says. “So the combination of those two things together kind of took me aback, but then he played it really cool and did not seem that interested in it.”
Aaron says he admits he played it too cool when he first met Anna, but he says their shared rare birthdays soon became a core part of their relationship.
“I love the cosmic kind of romantic quality about it,” Aaron says. “The idea of being born on the same day, in the same year, and finding each other means that we've spent every day on this Earth at the same time. Not necessarily together in the same place, but we've been on the same kind of cosmic journey in life together since Feb. 29, 1984. And I think that's really special and an amazing relationship story that we have.”
Anna and Aaron say they’ve been married for 10 years and have celebrated each leap year birthday they’ve been together by celebrating with friends or going on a big trip together. They also say that their kids are huge leap day fans and love to commemorate their birthday by watching the NBC sitcom 30 Rock’s skit of Leap Day Williams.
Another leapling, Christina Land, says she was born on Feb. 29, 1980, and looks forward to celebrating her 11th birthday this year with friends at the 1st and Bowl. She says it’s always been a tradition for her to ring in her leap day birthday by celebrating age appropriately.
“My mom was also really into the number and age I’m turning,” Land says. “When I turned 12, also turning three, I had a dance party in our dining room, as you do as a 12-year-old, and my mom had a giant banner made. It said, ‘Happy Third Birthday/12th Birthday!’ That was always a fun thing growing up, and that my mom acknowledged every four years was even more special than the other three out of four years.”
On a typical non-leap year birthday, Land says growing up, she’d celebrate on Feb. 28, but she now celebrates February as her “birthday month.” Aside from making a neat icebreaker, she says some cons to having a leap day birthday include that some websites don’t have her birthday when creating accounts, and her 21st birthday wasn’t recognized until March 1 (so it was tough for her to celebrate her first drink at a bar on Feb. 28).
“I think the only cool perks were for being a leap day birthday I've come across as is just an excuse to act immature and blame it on my age,” she says.
For Drew Shackleford, leap day represents the day she proposed to her husband, Scott Casey, in 2020. Shackleford says she got the idea to propose from an old British Isles tradition where women propose to their partner on leap day.
“I had been planning on asking him to marry me for maybe six months,” Shackleford says. “The thing is, he would just look at me when we were having a beautiful moment, and he would say, ‘Will you marry me someday?’ And he would say that over and over again. So I knew that, eventually, that was going to be what we were doing. And I just decided to go ahead and claim my date of Feb. 29.,” Shackleford says.
Casey says he wasn’t expecting Shackleford’s proposal, but it will forever be a special moment. Although it’s not the day they got married, Feb. 29 is a special anniversary for both of them.
“We do have a separate wedding anniversary, but I kind of like this one better,” Casey says. “Because for a wedding anniversary, it happens every year, so it's a little bit more routine. But when it's something like this, it’s a day that doesn't exist in another year and so you can kind of go all out.”
This year will be the first celebration of their engagement anniversary.
“I think it's absolutely brilliant … that we get to enjoy that magic very sporadically,” Shackleford says.
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