Fun Facts about Leap Year

By Anastacia Mott Austin

"I’m going to be 14 for the second time," said New Hampshire’s Lori Mayer as she boarded a plane for Texas and the World Wide Leap Year Festival. Mayer (who’s actually 56) has a birthday on February 29th – Leap Day. "I remember getting teased, ‘Ha, ha, you don’t have a birthday,’" said Mayer to local reporters. "But now it’s a real treat."

Mayer faced the same odds of being born on this strange and rare day as anyone else – about one in 1500. People born on this day often have a sense of humor about it, and most don’t mind only getting a real birthday once every four years.

Jim Ciampa says he’s used his unique birthday for jokes and pick-up lines. "I used to tell the girls in college I would never make it to my 25th birthday," he quips. (I wonder how well that worked for him.) Since his actual age is 68, he is still not officially 25.

The fun is obvious to those who were born on this day, but what about the rest of us? What does it mean to have an "extra" day? For the optimists among us, it’s one more day to celebrate life. For those whose glasses are regrettably only half-full, it’s another day to face the drudgery of work – and a free one at that, if your salary is annual.

The leap year phenomenon was created in 46 B.C, and later amended, when Julius Caesar realized that the number of days in a year did not exactly coincide with how long it actually took the earth to rotate around the sun.

Caesar amended the calendar and added an extra day to February, and the first year the new calendar was used lasted fifteen months, to make up for the discrepancy.

But he didn’t have it quite right. With a 365-day year, there are not quite six hours left over: five hours, 48 minutes and 46 seconds. The Julian calendar was slightly overcompensating, so the seasons began to get out of sync with the calendar again.

By the time Pope Gregory XIII came along in 1582 and changed the calendar again (hence the term, "Gregorian calendar"), the Julian calendar was off by ten days.

Gregory added the stipulation that leap year would only be observed in years ending in "00" (i.e. 1800, 1900, 2000) if they could be divided by 400. This allowed a slight enough compensation to balance out the minutes shorted by each extra leap year day.

However, folks back in 1582 did not appreciate being robbed of 10 days of their lives – the calendar that year went from October 4th directly to October 15th – and protested in the streets, believing their lives would then be shorter.

In the times since, people have taken advantage of the leap day’s reputation for strangeness, and developed a few superstitions and traditions around the day.

It is said that on February 29th, ladies may propose marriage to any single gentleman, and he will be cursed with bad luck should he turn her down.

"This custom reflects the fact that February 29 is strange and odd," says Steve Sayers, a social psychologist at Britain’s Leeds Metropolitan University, to reporters. "It's an anomaly and doesn’t fit in, so traditions and customs have built up to reflect that. Leap day is a bit like Halloween or Christmas: the usual rules don't apply."

But while marriage proposals are encouraged on leap day, marriages are not. In fact, in Greece it is considered bad luck to marry on any day of a leap year – a bad omen indeed for those in the wedding industry.

But for Jim Ciampa, it’s only been fun and games to have his birthday on February 29th, and he never misses a chance to joke about it. "I have a lawsuit against the government because they had me in combat at 6-1/2 years old," laughs Ciampa.

Adds the jovial 68-year-old grandfather, "I have one great-granddaughter who is older than I am."