It’s the holiday season, so let’s talk about birthdays. There’s always a method to the madness, and I’ll tell you why birthdays are important to consider at this time.
I’m not talking about little baby Jesus’s that one’s been covered since before Halloween in every store and on that radio station that blares only carols from November through January, thereby generating earworms that last well into March.
This column is dedicated to those souls born between Hanukkah and the first week of the new year, the period that includes Christmas and Kwanzaa and no doubt many other occasions, too.
Here’s why.
My daughter, Lily (now in her twenties), was born a few days before Christmas. Throughout her gestation, I was just happy my obstetrician reported that she was healthy, and I couldn’t wait to meet her; that’s all I thought about until a few days before she was born.
I was waddling through the Uptown Lund’s in mid-December, exiting the produce aisle with my belly pushing the cart as much as my hands, when I was accosted by an angel. I say accosted because she stormed up to me with flames in her eyes, but her words made her an angel to me forever.
I have no idea who she was, where she came from she had no cart or basket she just appeared. So, I’ll call her Anne, after St. Anne, the Patron Saint of Birthdays.
Anne pointed at my bulging stomach long past anyone’s wondering, “Is she pregnant or just putting on weight?”
Anne began her sermon with the same bluster as a rabid evangelical preacher: “You’re going to have a Christmas baby. I was born on Christmas Eve and my birthday was an interruption in the holiday’s celebrations. I never had a birthday party with friends.” (I get it, who’s free on Christmas Eve? Nobody.)
Anne barreled on, “I never got a birthday cake. I got Christmas cookies!” At this point there were tears in her eyes. “One year I begged my mother for a birthday cake, so she stuck candles in a fruitcake a [expletive] fruitcake!”
Anne was clearly on a roll. “You know the worst thing? They wrapped my birthday presents in Christmas paper and wrote ‘Merry Birthday’ on them! And!!! They put my birthday gifts under the (same previous expletive) tree!”
At this point Anne had exhausted her trauma litany and added simply, “Do not do this to your child.” And she strode off never to be seen again. (Maybe she vanished into thin air or was whisked off by a spaceship), leaving me not feeling weirded out, rather touched by an angel. Anne’s words seared through me.
Lily was born, and that first year it didn’t matter what I did, as a neonate has the cognitive skills of a goldfish, but as the years accumulated, I thought of Anne’s words and separated the birthday gifts from the Christmas ones by putting them on “the birthday table.” There was always a bona fide birthday cake, the carols were replaced by any music but, and her gifts were wrapped in birthday paper: Aside from there being a lit tree in the midst of the merrymaking, for Lily’s special day Christmas took a holiday.
Angels abound and surround us. Listen to them. All year long they deliver wise words you don’t even know you need. But if you’re open to them, you’ll listen and pay heed. Every year I thank Anne my St. Anne for her message. May you be an angel to others, too.
Happy Holidays to all of you. And to those latecomer Sagittarians and freshly minted Capricorns, Happy Birthday as well!
— Dorothy
