A rare day for 'leap babies'
With birthdays every four years, they share gift of aging slowly
Nancy Antonellis turns 11 today and the
Brockton mother of three plans on celebrating
her birthday in style. "I'm not sure
what my husband and the kids have planned," she
said. "But whatever we do I'll enjoy it."
As will Hanover's Greg Thompson, who weeks
ago asked his parents to mark his third birthday
today with money and a
hockey stick. Meanwhile, Stoughton birthday girl
Cynthia Gallagher can't help but wonder what an
8-year-old has to do
to get a drink around here.
"It's frustrating, getting carded," Gallagher joked. "I know I look older than 8."
Confusing? Not for these three, who say they
are blessed and cursed with Feb. 29 birthdays.
Antonellis, Gallagher, and
Thompson join an estimated 4 million people
worldwide, including roughly 200,000 in this
country, born on a leap day.
"When you're young, you're not crazy about
being born on leap day because you think for
three years you don't exist,"
said the 36-year-old Gallagher, who once managed
a free birthday meal from a restaurant on a
non-leap year because
the waitstaff took pity on her. "During those
years you end up celebrating your birthday on
whatever day seems convenient.
These are things people like us have to deal
with because someone came up with an extra day
every four years."
That someone was Roman Emperor Julius Caesar.
Told by his mathematicians that it takes 365.25
days for the Earth to
make a complete circuit around the sun, Caesar
proclaimed in 45 BC that the last day of the
last month of the year would
be skipped three out of four years to preserve
the schedule of the seasons. Under the Julian
calendar, Feb. 30 was
considered the last day of the year. That rule
held for 50 years, until the reign of Roman
Emperor Caesar Augustus, who
stole the final day of February and added it to
the end of August -- which he had named for
himself -- so his month would
have a fit-for-an-emperor 31 days. The Augustan
calendar remained intact for 1,578 years, until
Pope Gregory XIII boldly
moved the end of the calendar year from Feb. 29
to Dec. 31.
Without an added day every fourth year, every 720 years or so would bring Christmas in July.
"You
hear people complain about leap year and what it
does," said Raenell Dawn, cofounder of the
LEAPzine newsletter
for the Honor Society of Leap Year Day Babies,
an Internet-based group with 3,000 members in
about 50 countries.
"Watches with calendars in them need to be
adjusted. Some computers might not recognize the
date. People who work
on salary have to work an extra day for free
this year. Well, if there wasn't a leap day
every fourth year people would
complain so much more than they do now. How
would you like the Fourth of July in winter?"
Dawn,
who lives in Salem, Ore., said that after
decades of being the "forgotten holiday," leap
day is beginning to return to
the levels of popularity it enjoyed back in the
late 1800s and early 1900s.
"Leap day used to be a big thing," she said.
"Women's scarfs came out celebrating it, as did
calendar covers. You'd see frogs everywhere.
That's our official mascot.
They help give us identity."
And
identity, she said, is something leap-day babies
often struggle to find. "I used to suffer what I
called EBS, which stands
for Empty Box Syndrome," said Dawn. "It's when
you're growing up, as I did, with two other
sisters, and you see their names
in a calendar box marking their birthdays. Me? I
didn't have a real box with my name in it,
except for every fourth year."
Richard and Judith Collins of Plymouth
married on leap day in 1992. "We didn't do it
because we wanted to celebrate our
marriage only once every four years," Judith
Collins said with a laugh. "Richard and I just
have a sense of humor and we
thought it would be funny."
To avoid conflict about which day to
celebrate, they take a Caribbean cruise between
mid-February and mid-March. "We
celebrate on the boat on whatever day we pick,"
Richard said.
Antonellis, who in 2000 joined her youngest
daughter in turning 10, said her birth date once
caused an awkward moment
after she had been stopped in Brockton for a
traffic violation. "The police officer saw my
driver's license and noticed my
birth date read February 29," said the
44-year-old Duxbury Middle School teacher. "He
thought I must be driving on a
fake ID. It took him a while to clear it up.
When he did, he let me go, even though I don't
recall what the violation was in
the first place, because he felt so embarrassed
for not believing me."
Dawn said moments like that are inevitable
for leap-year babies. "Luckily, they're few and
far between," she said. "Mostly,
you can have a real good time with it."
Just ask Mary Elizabeth Thompson. Her son
Greg, a sixth-grader at Hanover Middle School
(at age 3!), has learned to
make the most of his unusual birthday.
"When it's not a leap year, Greg works everyone for about a week's worth of birthdays," she said.
"He gets two or more birthday cakes and more
and more gifts. When there is a February 29th,
he only gets one day to
himself. Leap years work against him."
They don't work against the town of Anthony on the Texas-New Mexico border.
Proclaimed in 1988 by the governors of New
Mexico and Texas as the "Leap Year Capital of
the World," Anthony
(which has a population of about 40,000)
annually celebrates the extra day with music,
food, and parades.
According to Texas newspaper accounts, only nine
people showed up in 1988. But by 2000 the party
had exploded
to nearly 10,000 guests.
"This year, from what I understand, Anthony
should see even more people," said Dawn, 44. To
her, leap-day babies
are like wine, perspective, and Steely Dan: they
improve with age.
"We're born on a day that maintains balance
in the world. That means something," she said.
"At the very least, we get
to be a child forever."