Nine years ago on Christmas morning, round about 11:30 am, I gave birth to daughter number 2. (I can always remember the time, as my impeccably dressed doctor arrived to say "Thanks for getting me out of cleaning up brunch!" and caught our girl on the way out a few seconds later.) As my local friends will tell you, I tried VERY hard not to have a Christmas Day baby; truth be told she probably should have been born on the 24th but I was so determined that I wasn't in labor that I lay flat on the couch with a book and managed to stave it off until an even worse birth date.
It was a glorious day and she is a glorious girl. But man, did we sweat having one of those poor kids with a holiday birthday that may induce people to give her two gifts instead of one, and never allow her to be the belle of her own ball. I even wrote a little story about how hard we worked to make it special for her, one of my first published essays.
That guilt is so 2000. Now that she's 9, most people around us refer to December as my child's "Birthday Season." From the Santa Lucia festivities on December 13th (special Santa Lucia birthday bread, open bday gifts from family) to the birthday celebration at school (another loaf of the Lucia Crown bread to share with the class) to the birthday party for friends to Christmas morning, with the rest of the accumulated birthday gifts and another cake, she really is not suffering. Not a day goes by that doesn't reference her birthday, name day, or Christmas all month, and she absolutely revels in (and is properly grateful for) the attention.
I am totally petitioning to move my April birthday to Easter this year.
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