When do leap-day babies celebrate their birthdays?

The Straight Dope: When do leap-day babies celebrate their birthdays?

Dear Cecil:

I have always wondered what people do who are born on leap day, February 29. Obviously they age each year, but do they celebrate it on the 28th or the 1st? And when their actual birth date does come around, do they have a really huge bash to make up for lost time? --Kristin, Los Angeles

Dear Kristin:

My assistant Little Ed explained this in his book Know It All, so you know it can't be that complicated. What you celebrate on your birthday isn't the annual arrival of your birth date; it's the fact that you're one year older. One year = one complete revolution by the earth around the sun = 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 46 seconds.

To figure the right day to celebrate your birthday, you add 365 and one-quarter days to the hour of your birth. Suppose you were born February 29, 1972 at 10 PM. Then 365 and one-quarter days went by and behold, the first anniversary of your birth hour came on March 1, 1973, at about 4 AM.

The second and third anniversaries also fell on March 1, at 10 AM and 4 PM respectively. Comes year four (1976), and your anniversary is back where it started, February 29 at 10 PM.

Things would have worked out differently if you'd been born at 4 AM on leap day. Your first, second, and third birth-hour anniversaries would have occurred on February 28 at 10 AM, 4 PM, and 10 PM, respectively. If you'd been born at 4 PM, your first anniversary would fall on February 28 but your second and third on March 1. What happens for leap-day babies born at other hours is left as an exercise for the student.

The real problem isn't leap-day people, it's those smug non-leap-day babies who think all they've got to do to be in synch with the cosmos is celebrate their birthdays on the same date every year. Not a chance, Lance.

If you were born February 28, 1972, at 4 AM, you were supposed to celebrate all your non-leap-year birthdays on February 27. Did you? Of course not. Before you were out of diapers you were shaking down the 'rents for gifts under false pretenses. Considering how today's youth start out, it's no wonder so many come to no good.

But look on the bright side. The year 2000, thank Jah, will be a normal leap year. Years divisible by 100 usually aren't. (The rule is: year divisible by 100, no leap year unless also divisible by 400, in which case leap year. It's to keep the calendar lined up with the solar system. Trust Uncle Cecil.)

Were we to skip a leap year in 2000, the awful consequence would be that everybody in the world would celebrate his or her birthday on the wrong day. (At least in some years. If you must get technical, on average we'd be 66 percent more wrong than previously.) Talk about dodging a bullet.

In leap-day-less 1900 they weren't so lucky. Take my late grandmother, born in 1887. Commencing in 1900 she began celebrating her birthday a day before it actually occurred. For the next 81 years, in short, she was living a lie. She was a dour woman; now I know why:

--CECIL ADAMS

A Straight Dope Classic from Cecil's storehouse of human knowledge

http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a960209.html

Birthdays

A person born on February 29 may be called a "leapling" or "leaper"[10]. In common years they usually celebrate their birthdays on 28 February or 1 March.

For legal purposes, their legal birthdays depend on how different laws count time intervals. In Taiwan, for example, the legal birthday of a leapling is 28 February in common years, so a Taiwanese leapling born on February 29, 1980 would have legally reached 18 years old on February 28, 1998.

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If a period fixed by weeks, months, and years does not commence from the beginning of a week, month, or year, it ends with the ending of the day which proceeds the day of the last week, month, or year which corresponds to that on which it began to commence.　 But if there is no corresponding day in the last month, the period ends with the ending of the last day of the last month.[11]

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In some situations, March 1 is used as the birthday in a non-leap year since it then is the day just after February 28.

There are many instances in children's literature where a person's claim to be only a quarter of their actual age turns out to be based on counting their leap-year birthdays. A similar device is used in the plot of Gilbert and Sullivan's 1879 comic opera The Pirates of Penzance: As a child, Frederic was apprenticed to a band of pirates until the the age of 21. Now, having passed his 21st year, he leaves the pirate band and falls in love. However, it turns out that the pirate indenture says that his apprenticeship does not end until his 21st birthday, and since he was born on February 29, that day will not arrive until he is in his eighties, and so he must leave his fiancée and return to the pirates. Of course, it all turns out happily in the end.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_year#Birthdays

Folk traditions

In the English speaking world, it is a tradition that women may propose marriage only on leap years. While it has been argued that the tradition was initiated by Saint Patrick or Brigid of Kildare in 5th century Ireland, it is dubious as the tradition has not been attested before the 19th century.[7] Supposedly, a 1288 law by Queen Margaret of Scotland (then age five and living in Norway), required that fines be levied if a marriage proposal was refused by the man; compensation ranged from a kiss to £1 to a silk gown, in order to soften the blow.[8] Because men felt that put them at too great a risk, the tradition was in some places tightened to restricting female proposals to the modern leap day, 29 February, or to the medieval leap day, 24 February. According to Felten: "A play from the turn of the 17th century, 'The Maydes Metamorphosis,' has it that 'this is leape year/women wear breeches.' A few hundred years later, breeches wouldn't do at all: Women looking to take advantage of their opportunity to pitch woo were expected to wear a scarlet petticoat -- fair warning, if you will."[9]

In Denmark, the tradition is that women may propose on leap day 24 February and that refusal must be compensated with 12 pairs of gloves.

In Greece, it is believed that getting married in a leap year is bad luck for the couple[citation needed]. Thus, mainly in the middle of the past century, couples avoided setting a marriage date in a leap year.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_year#Folk_traditions

Leap year babies hop through hoops of joy, pain of novelty birthday

BY CHRISTINA HALL • FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER • February 29, 2008

Raul Perera wanted his newborn, Lorelei, to be a leapling.

"I think it would be pretty neat. A pretty unique thing," the Warren resident said of having a child with a birth date that comes every four years.

But his wife, Tabitha, wasn't jumping for joy at the prospect of their daughter being born today, leap year day.

"For a little kid, not to have a birthday" every "year would be kind of devastating," she said.

Lorelei wasn't due until April, but was delivered Wednesday.

Though the chance of being born on leap year day is about 1 in 1,500, there are about 4 million leapers worldwide, including many in metro Detroit.

Being a leaper, as adults are called, brings with it the novelty of staying young because the person's birth date occurs once every four years. But it also brings some frustration -- from trouble registering for services online with computer programs that don't recognize Feb. 29 as a valid date, to getting arrested for having a driver's license where the birth date and expiration date don't match.

Raenell Dawn, cofounder of the Honor Society of Leap Year Day Babies, an online birthday club, is a leaper who is an activist and educator.

Dawn supports leaper birth certificates bearing the Feb. 29 date. She also supports driver's licenses having a Feb. 29 expiration date because that's the date on which they were born.

In Michigan, leapers' licenses expire March 1. Dawn, who turns 48 -- or 12 -- today, said she would like calendar companies to mark the extra day in the year on their products.

A special day to enjoy

Despite a few frustrations with their actual birth date, area leapers say they enjoy their quadrennial event.

"I will be 13," Cindy Gorecki of Davisburg said proudly when she was asked her age. But the preschool teacher has lived for 52 years.

Growing up, Gorecki said her mother picked the day that was most convenient for her to celebrate Gorecki's birthday during a non-leap year. Now, Gorecki makes her husband celebrate two days -- Feb. 28 and March 1.

"That's only fair," she said with a laugh.

And she's not the only one reveling in her youth.

Deirdre Thompson, born leap year 1944, is celebrating her Sweet 16 with a bash complete with dance and hula hoop contests and lots of decorative frogs.

As a child, she didn't fully comprehend why her birthday was not on the calendar. Now, the 64-year-old retired teacher from Detroit gets few presents Feb. 28, mostly from her husband. Even her mom sends her gifts late.

But when Feb. 29 rolls around, "I get cards from people I haven't heard from in years. ... I get a lot of phone calls."

Not everyone's top pick

Those who probably won't be getting a lot of calls today are doctors, nurses and midwives who deliver babies.

Obstetricians and gynecologists in metro Detroit said most parents-to-be who have some choice on the day their child will be born -- such as a scheduled cesarean section -- elect not to have the baby on leap year day.

But there are a few who jump at the chance.

"We have two patients who are doing everything in their heavenly, womanly power to deliver that day," said Dr. Mark Dykowski of Generations OB-GYN Centers in Birmingham.

One woman is pulling from folklore and a baker's dozen list of things to do or eat to go into labor. The lists include walking, eating spicy food and being on bumpy roads. Dykowski said he thought she was trying "any and all of those things."

He and other doctors said they would not do something medically unsafe to ensure a woman delivers on a specific date. But requests to strive for or avoid certain days do come.

Being a leaper has been fun for bus driver Randy Hendrix, 48, despite being teased as a child by classmates because he technically was younger than them.

Later in life, the Holly man and his three children always joked about how they were older than him.

Karen Tinkis, 60, of Clarkston wants others to join the Feb. 29 birthday club.

She was to be born March 1, but arrived a day early during a leap year.

"Everybody thinks you're special ... because it's something out of the ordinary," the retired business owner said.

Contact CHRISTINA HALL at 586-469-4683 or chall@freepress.com. Staff writer Georgea Kovanis contributed to this report.

http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080229/NEWS05/802290352