Happy Leap Day to everyone
You mean you didn’t grow up celebrating Leap Day with a visit from Leap Day William, who shows up every four years to trade children’s tears for candy?
For some, the above line needs no explanation; in fact, the sheer mention of Leap Day William is likely enough to elicit a smile from some (including yours truly).
For the rest of you dear readers, don’t fret. The explanation is simple: You’re just not caught up on your “30 Rock.”
Even in this, its most uneven (and possibly last) season, the NBC comedy starring Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin is still appointment viewing for me. And last Thursday, oh my, did they outdo themselves.
Like many other shows, the episode focused on the extra day we had on Wednesday, but “30 Rock” went so far as to invent an entire holiday out of thin air.
The Leap Day “holiday” comes in the spirit of “Festivus” (for the rest of us), the classic non-holiday that has long outlived its creation on an episode of “Seinfeld.”
In the episode, Tina Fey’s character Liz Lemon is surprised to learn she has missed out on the existence of the holiday (in part because of an ill-timed Michaels Crafts Crafting Cruise and growing up in a town that only celebrates Amish holidays — trust me, it all makes sense in the episode).
So Lemon acts as the audience stand-in as we’re introduced to the wonderful world of Leap Day William, complete with its own USA Network 24-hour movie marathon of “Leap Day Williams,” the faux film starring Jim Carey as a lawyer who transforms into Leap Day William (gills and all — look, I told you that you’d have to watch the episode).
The once-every-four-years holiday has great slogans (“Real life is for March!”) and requires you wear blue and yellow (as bright a hue as you can find, of course), and if you forget, you risk other celebrants unleashing the Leap Day sing-songy tradition of “Poke your eye, pull your hair, you forgot what clothes to wear!” (Or the Boston version, “Stomp on your foot, kick you in the knee; Yankees suck, go Pats!”)
Other musical traditions of Leap Day include the classic sing-alongs like, “Leap Day William/Leap Day William/bursting from the sea/Will he bring his bucket of sweets/for mom and pop and me?” If you’re especially lucky, you might get a visit from Leap Day William himself, who is a vision in a bright blue tux, yellow shirt and matching blue boater hat.
The whole thing is, of course, ridiculous. What makes it spectacular, was that when I brought up Leap Day William in several of my classes on Wednesday, many students bought it — hook, line and sinker. Like Liz Lemon in the episode, they couldn’t believe that they hadn’t heard about the holiday and were rapt by all the traditions associated with the day.
Which raises a few points, the most important one being the simple but uncomfortable truth: Almost all of our holiday traditions are patently ridiculous when you really think about them.
In my tongue-in-cheek defense of Leap Day being a “real” holiday, I pointed out that Leap Day William trading candy for tears is no different than a giant bunny rabbit hiding candy filled eggs or a fat red-clad burglar who exchanges presents for kids behaving themselves.
And then there’s comedian Jim Gaffigan’s insistence that Christmas decorating is the behavior of a drunk man: “I’m gonna hang my socks over the fireplace…maybe tie some leaves to the ceiling, see if I can get some action…chop down that tree, bring it in here. Take all these lights, put ’em out there.” It’s all pretty absurd if you step back and look at it.
But “30 Rock’s” Leap Day would not be complete without food traditions: You eat rhubarb, of course. Again, for comparison, I humbly submit the New Year’s Pretzel (a Szuminsky family staple), ham for Easter and turkey for Thanksgiving.
So while I could (rightly) be concerned with the gullibility of my students (or my super villain-esque ability at persuasion), I choose instead to learn a Leap Day lesson about holidays in general: They’re basically bonkers — but that doesn’t mean they’re not a heckuva good time.
Even when they’re not real.
If you’d like to wish him a merry Leap Day, Brandon Szuminsky can be reached at bszuminsky@heraldstandard.com.