It’s leap day because … I think if everyone leaps at the same time, China falls into the ocean. Or something like that. I learned that in school. I mean we actually tried it on the playground, but the teachers could still order Chinese lanterns from Oriental Trading after that, which is proof that China is still over there somewhere. So it must’ve not worked.
Why don’t we celebrate leap day with more leaping? And cake. We could do lots of leaping activities. We could get in burlap sacks and see who could leap to the finish line first. We never do this on February 29. We always do it on May twenty-eighth-ish and call it field day.
Field day happens because the janitors want to get everyone outside at the same time on the last day of school so they can mop all the floors, and they won’t have to stay an extra day while all the other kids are out for summer. I always wondered, if field day was so much fun, why we only did it once a year. I mean, why weren’t we racing to the store to buy potato sacks for home races? Why weren’t we tossing eggs in the front yard? The deal is, these things are not really all that fun. They just seem fun when you compare them to staying in the building to graph intersecting lines and fix comma splices.
But wait! I wasn’t talking about field day. I was talking about leap day, which we should also celebrate by leaping marbles over other marbles for no reason. It’s called Chinese checkers, and it's more proof that China’s still around.
Leap day happens every four years. That’s because it’s an election year and all the candidates need to add a day to the calendar to raise enough funds to be elected. It’s also an Olympic year which is when all the good television shows get preempted by leaping events such as figure skating, the long jump, and potato sack races.
It’s easy to remember that way. We all know that every four years, four things happen: leap day, the presidential election, the Olympics, and the extended car warranty running out the day before the alternator burns up. On alternate years.
So it’s rolled around again. A calendar year that can be divided by four. So we add a day to it in order to make the earth’s rotation work out on the time clock since it shaved a few hours off its 365th day for three years in a row. We just make it up by adding a day to February, which is only fair since it got jilted because it apparently was gone to the bathroom or something when the days were being doled out evenly to each month. I mean what’s the deal? Weeks are easy. They have seven days. But there’s no good way to remember how many days are in each month, and about the time you finally do get it down - whether through looking at your knuckles or through a rhyme that gets stuck in your head – February comes and blows the whole thing to smithereens.
So you just have to remember 28, which rhymes with fish on your plate, and you’ve got it. For three years! And then it changes again. So it’s a special day like that, but since leap is a term usually only reserved for amphibian references, such as “leaping lizards” and “a round of good old-fashioned leap frog,” we really don’t know what to do with it. Being that we’re human, and not amphibians and all.
So I guess the plan is just to discount the donuts. That’s what I heard - that Krispy Kreme would be discounting a second box of donuts if you pay full price for the first box, which I think costs exactly the same as hip replacement surgery.
Which comes in pretty handy for leaping, btw!
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