Leap day 2024: the couples celebrating their first wedding anniversary – four years after they got married
On a sunny, hot Thursday in Sydney, Ryan Murro and Kathryn Malenkamp celebrated their first official wedding anniversary – four years after tying the knot.
The couple renewed their vows in front of friends and family during a tear-filled ceremony at the registry office, recommitting to one another and celebrating their love on their anniversary – 29 February a leap-year day.
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They’re one of more than 450 couples in New South Wales to celebrate their “first” anniversary on Thursday after being wed on 29 February 2020.
On Thursday, soon-to-be and fresh newlyweds filled the corridors at the registry office in Pyrmont, with 14 couples choosing to say “I do”.
Murro and Malenkamp were living in Sydney’s inner west when they first met. They experienced the opposite of love at first sight, with the pair purposefully avoiding each other. But after their first real conversation, they realised they had something special.
Their dating anniversary falls on Halloween, so they knew they wanted another special date to mark their wedding.
Murro and Malenkamp were married in 2020, the last leap year, but due to the pandemic, they could only have two witnesses.
“The plan was to have a big party and just say ‘surprise!’ but we all got locked down for a couple of years,” Malenkamp said.
Four years later the perfect opportunity finally arose.
Since 2004, more than 900 couples across the state have married on a leap day.
Leap days have proven more popular than Valentine’s Day for wedding ceremonies in Brisbane this year, with 27 ceremonies held in the city on Thursday, compared to 14 in 2020 and eight in 2016.
The leap day stems from a 2000year-old effort to align humanity’s different measurements of time with the planet’s actual movement through space.
“It takes the Earth 24 hours or one day to rotate once on its axis, then it takes the Earth 365 and a quarter days to orbit the sun once,” Macquarie University astronomer Dr Stuart Ryder said. “If we don’t make any adjustment for that extra quarter of a day each year, then after four years we’ll be one day behind.
“Eventually we would be having a wintertime Christmas here in Australia.”
Societies around the world have tinkered with leap days and leap months for thousands of years, but the current Gregorian calendar arrangement has remained in place since its invention in 1582.
“Thankfully, we’re pretty good now for at least the next 5,000 years … maybe at some long distant point in the future they will need to add a day,” Ryder said.
The system’s stability relies on the complicated arrangement of skipping the leap day every 100th year, except for multiples of 400. So while there was no 29 February in 1800 or 1900, there was one in 2000.
Astronomers like Ryder try to avoid the complicated arrangements by using a calendar that removes years altogether, instead counting days.
“It’s much easier for us to calculate the difference in time between two events – that might be how long it takes the planet to go round a star and things like that,” he said.
Although Murro and Malenkamp – and all the newlyweds from Thursday – will have to wait another four years to celebrate their anniversaries, the couple say they still mark the occasion each year on either 28 February or 1 March.
And as for their next official anniversary on leap year 2028? They’re planning to head a bit farther afield than Pyrmont: to Las Vegas.