As a child, I was glad my birthday wasn’t on February 29th in a leap year. The thought of having a birthday only once every four years was sad, and I figured all of my friends would make fun of me for being only two, when they were eight.

As a young adult, I thought just the opposite. How cool would it be, if you were celebrating your sixth birthday, when all of your friends were turning twenty four? You just knew your actual birthday every four years would be a blowout.

And now? Now I don’t think about birthdays at all in regard to leap year. Instead, I think “What did I do with all of those extra days?” So far, I’ve experienced sixteen Leap Years, with sixteen February 29ths in my life. What did I do with those extra two weeks and two days? As far as I can tell, nothing, zero, zip, zilch, nada… Which is kind of sad when you think about it. Hell, if the sixteen days were all in a row, what a great vacation you could have.

Of course, it’s not sixteen days in a row. Still, it’s an extra day, and this year it’s on a Saturday to boot. What are you planning to do, anything special?

A multitude of online sites are offering suggestions – everything from a great brunch, to reading a book, helping the environment, or about a thousand other ideas. My guess is you don’t need any advise on how to spend the extra day, and probably aren’t even thinking of it as an extra day. But maybe you should.

I’ve mulled it over a bit, and I’m now thinking of this day as a gift from God, that’s also ratified by Science. It seems a sin to waste it without a thought. I’ve promised myself, no matter what I do, I will make a conscious decision and won’t just float through the day as if it were one of the regular 365.

What am I going to do this year? I plan to…

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Addendum:

A few Leap Day facts and stories:

⁃ Leap Year math is actually a bit fascinating. As most of us know, leap year has an extra day added to the calendar in February. The year is actually 365.242190 days long, so a leap year must be added roughly once every four years. However, in the long term the math doesn’t quite work out, so the actual formula is – there will be a leap year every year divisible by four, except for years which are both divisible by 100 and not divisible by 400. Therefore, the year 2000 was a leap year, but the years 1700, 1800, and 1900 were not. How cool is that?

⁃ Historically Leap Day provided the “opportunity” for a woman to propose marriage to the man in her life. This evidently started in Ireland hundreds of years ago. Now days, women are of course capable of proposing at any time of the year.

⁃ The Leap Day Cocktail was invented by bartender Harry Craddock at London’s Savoy Hotel in 1928 (yes, a leap year). Craddock’s original recipe:

Combine over ice:

— 1 dash lemon juice

— 2/3 gin (2oz)

— 1/6 Grand Marnier (1/2 oz)

— 1/6 sweet vermouth (1/2 oz)

Shake, strain into a cocktail glass, garnish with a lemon peel, and enjoy. I think it’s bette with just a bit more lemon juice, but that’s just me.