Happy inconvenient birthday, babe!

Have you ever known anyone whose birthday is really close to Christmas?  Well I’m married to one!

People in that situation have a curious love/hate relationship with Christmas.  Not that they hate Christmas at all — they just don’t want their birthday to be merged with it.  I used to know a guy whose birthday was January 4th.  At his job, other people would bring in donuts or whatnot for someone’s birthday, and he always hated it when people would bring in obvious Christmas leftovers for his birthday.  The red and green frosting was a dead giveaway.

My wife’s birthday is today, December 27th!  So she’s very attuned to never having her birthday swallowed up by Christmas.  And I can’t blame her.  But that means that along with all of the Christmas shopping for all the relatives and her, there is also birthday shopping.  Not only that, we have the dogs and “they” also give her presents.

So basically, I buy a bunch of presents for her (thank goodness we have lists), then I write them all down in a sort of hand-made spreadsheet, and decide which things are from me for Christmas, from me for her birthday, and from the dogs for Christmas and her birthday.  PLUS, she grew up with the tradition of stockings, so there also have to be a few little things from “Santa”.  After completing the spreadsheet, then I can wrap, because it would be crass to have birthday presents wrapped in Christmas paper.

I love her to bits, and there’s not a woman in the world, or on any other planet for that matter, that I would trade her for.  But I wouldn’t mind her birthday being in June or July!