I can’t help but feel both sorry for and jealous of people born on Leap Day, and here’s why.

(Yes, Superman's birthday is Feb. 29th!)
When you’re born on Christmas, you at least get a double celebration (even if you only get one celebratory Suzy’s visit). If you’re born on Halloween, you get an excuse to eat even more candy than most of your friends. Born on Easter? Well, part of your party will probably be egg hunts, which are the most fun a kid can have besides making their own custom fro-yo cup. And then there’s, uh, President’s Day, which I know is basically like Christmas but better, right? Alright, admittedly President’s Day is not as exciting as some of these other ones, but with each of these holidays, a coinciding birthday is still made more special or at least extra exciting!
Leap Day, however, strikes me differently. You do get the interest of it being a less frequent holiday by a factor of four, and you definitely get to joke about being a 5 year-old when you’re a 20 year-old and so on, but both of these elements make your birthday all about Leap Day instead of the other way around. While funny, the fewer-birthdays joke implies you don’t get to celebrate as genuinely or as often as those born on normal, annual dates. The mere idea of this makes me sad, but it also leads to the reason for my simultaneous jealousy.
The way I see it, one born on a Leap Day is instantly and irrevocably entered into one of the most exclusive and rare social categories in the History of planet Earth. Anyone can make a million dollars. Anyone can learn to bowl a 300. Anyone can even make the Suzy’s Swirl cup of the week! But being born on a Leap Day is a lot like being born royalty: it doesn’t just happen to anyone. And those with Leap Day birthdays are destined to receive more widespread attention once every four years than regular-birthdayers receive across that time. You even share a birthday with Superman.
So how can one leverage his/her Leap Day birthday to maximum effect? I would recommend this.
Keep joking about being ¼ your real age. That joke never gets old.
Find others who share your birthday and connect over your unique status.
Celebrate with us at Suzy’s Swirl. Seriously, you can get a free mini cup on your birthday, so why wouldn’t you drop by?
There are more tips, but we can cover those in four years when it’s relevant again.
“So it was that on the twenty-ninth day of February, at the beginning of the thaw, this singular person fell out of infinity into Iping Village.”
H.G. Wells, The Invisible Man
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