Well, the first thing to say is happy Christmas! I hope that, if you are celebrating the big day, you have a great time – may your turkey be juicy, your baubles glint and your relatives refrain from getting too drunk and telling that awful story about you again. I, however, have something else top of mind today – it’s my birthday.
Now let’s be honest, it’s a pretty terrible date to have as your birthday if you want to have even a modicum of fuss made about you. Why my mother couldn’t have popped me out a week earlier or perhaps held off until the new year I just don’t know. But, no, she chose Christmas Eve. And while I am the one who has suffered from festivity fatigue across the years, when I was a kid my older sisters would cheekily tell me in great detail how my arrival had ruined their Christmas because they were shipped off to grandparents while my dad came to the hospital to see his wife and accident child (my mum was 45, my dad 50 and I was not something that they had planned for). And, what’s more, that winter the snow fell thick and furious so my mum ended up staying in hospital for days.
As a child, however, it seemed OK to have your birthday on Christmas Eve: you were never in school so unlikely to be given “the bumps”, a ritual that saw you grabbed by the limbs and thrown into the air, often with a tinge of violent abandon – your arms faced a clear risk of dislocating. And, in the beginning, my parents made a point of getting separate presents for both days. But over time things changed and the dreaded “joint present” made itself known. Because while I definitely wasn’t at the top of the maths class, I was more than capable of working out the price of the joint present and deducing that this did not represent value for money if it was supposed to constitute two fabulous gifts.
And then it got worse. One year – admittedly when I was in my twenties – my parents clearly forgot their son’s birthday. In the flurry to prepare the vol-au-vents and to perch the fairy atop the tree, the offspring who had once all but owned Christmas as a fresh baby had to remind his folks that there was something more important to worry about than whether we had enough stuffing. I didn’t let that one drop for a long time.
And now? Rallying friends for dinner in the run-up to Christmas is a task and who wants to celebrate their big day weeks after the event? But then many people have the same issue with Christmas. Complicated or dispersed families and absent friends can make Christmas just seem like an exhausting and slightly unrewarding mission. You know what you are expected to do and feel but what if you want to do things differently? To break away from the table or the dash to buy last-minute gifts and make up your own traditions?
For my birthday this year I do have a lunch planned and will see friends but we will be in Spain with the dog. I am also looking forward to finding a moment to walk along the beach, feel the fresh air on our faces and do something life-affirming. Birthdays are special, Christmas too, but we need to worry less about the accepted script. Though believe me, if anyone ever goes down the joint present route with you then you are entitled to make a scene.