Why Isn’t Leap Day a Holiday?

February 29th rolls around once every four years. I know that the whole day is really just a mathematical path of least resistance. It takes 365.25 days for the Earth to complete an orbit, and the New Year’s countdown to 6 AM just doesn’t have the same ring to it. But it sounds like something out of folklore: Every four years, an extra day appears on the calendar, a day filled with secrets and wonders…

And how do we celebrate it?

We don’t. At best, we look at it and say, “Oh, yeah. Leap year. That’s fun?” Mostly, we just get annoyed when it bumps our weekend birthdays back to Monday.

But here’s the deal: Leap Day deserves to be a national holiday. On a day that’s half math and half magic already, we shouldn’t have to carry on with business as usual; we should sleep in and then go off to do something we might never get around to in a normal year.

30 Rock, the weird and wonderful NBC sitcom from the aughts, had a whole episode about Leap Day, where they imagined holiday traditions for the unsung holiday, including a Jim Carrey movie about the true spirit of the day.

We don’t have to run with all of those ideas, but I love that episode’s Leap Day saying:

“Real life is for March!”

Sigh… I just really feel like we should all have Thursday off. It’s looking like we have a very long year ahead.