Our Birthdays Are Not Our Birthdays

I don’t know why this occurred to me this morning, but it did. Strange things start running through my mind when I’m half awake and standing in the shower.
Our birthdays aren’t actually our birthdays.
I’m talking about leap years. This year was a leap year. Since I was born in 1977, there have been a total of eight leap years including this one. Let’s pretend my birthday is Christmas Day for argument’s sake. As we all know, a leap year has an extra day added in on the last day of February. February normally has 28 days. Every four years, we add a day between the 28th and March 1st. This pushes every day from March 1st onward one day into the future.
Let’s take that extra day and move it to between December 24th and December 25th. For all intents and purposes, December 25th gets moved and becomes December 26th while the leap day we inserted becomes December 25th. See where I’m going with this? The year magically becomes one day longer.
By moving my birthday ahead one day every four years, we get the following:
In 1980, my actual birthday was on December 26th.
In 1984, my actual birthday was on December 28th. This is where the days start compounding. We already have a day added from four years ago. Now we have one more day added to make two. Next time, we’ll have to add another one making it three.
In 1988, December 31st.
In 1992, January 4th.
In 1996, January 9th.
In 2000, January 15th.
In 2004, January 22nd.
And this year my actual birthday, again according to the modern calendar, will be on January 30th.
So there you have it. My birthday over the past thirty years has actually moved ahead almost a full month. I didn’t actually become a legal “adult” until three days after my birthday. On my 21st birthday, it was actually illegal for me to drink for another ten days.
Why do we follow this calendar and not an actual one? The closest estimate we have is that a current year is actually about 1/4 day longer than 365 days. Compounding this problem is the fact that as the centuries roll on, the actual length of a year gets shorter due to the earth wobbling because of the motion of the oceans as it spins.

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