Tell Us About...Birthdays and Unbirthdays
I am fortunate to have joined a talented group of bloggers for the Global Writing Challenge. Each month, we write about a very broadly defined topic, and the responses are quite varied. The newly revised group includes Deb’s World, Marsha in the Middle, Suzy Turner, Once Upon a Time and Happily Ever After Again, Cat's Wire, Coffee and Cocktails at the Casa, and me.
This month, Amy selected the topic Birthdays...which of course also suggests the complementary topic of Unbirthdays (i.e., every day of the year that is not your birthday).
December Birthday Challenges
For those of us born in December (and especially those born on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, or Boxing Day!), celebrating our birthday is not straightforward.
First of all, in this part of the world, the season from the day after Thanksgiving through the end of the year is full-on Christmas season, and that tends to dwarf everything else (and it is, you know, not completely unfair that Jesus gets top billing for December birthday celebrations). I was fortunate that my mom never started decorating for Christmas, put up a tree, played Christmas music (hello, Johnny Mathis), etc., until after my birthday, so even though it was Christmas season everywhere else, in our house it was not. That still gave us a couple weeks leading into Christmas, which was plenty (goodbye, Johnny Mathis).
Second, for every December kid there lingers the dreaded words "one big gift." I get it - it makes a kind of intuitive sense (to adults) that combining the birthday gift and the Christmas gift into one mega-gift means that you can buy something nicer than you might have otherwise done. But unless a kid asks for a big ticket item with explicit instruction that combining the holidays is OK, it is to be avoided! Not only is it that you are sort of cheating the kid out of an opportunity to open another gift, but let's get real: the "one big gift" is pretty much never twice the value of a regular gift. You're lucky to get a gift that is 1.5 times the value.
My intern (Google's Gemini) found that others December babies agree:
The Unbirthday Option
Some people with December birthdays have glommed onto the idea of celebrating their birthday at a different time of year, such as their half birthday in June. I haven't ever done that, but I never turn down an unbirthday gift! As the song from the 1951 Disney animated Alice in Wonderland movie points out:
"Statistics prove, prove that you've one birthday
Imagine just one birthday every year
But there are 364 unbirthdays
Precisely why we're gathered here to cheer"
(One year I made my sister a birthday card in which I drew a scene from this unbirthday tea party and included the above lines because even as a kid, I thought the idea of using statistics to "prove" how many birthdays a person has was hilarious. Now that I've taught research methods and statistics to undergrad psychology majors, I realize that not everyone thinks this way.)
Happy Unbirthday to Me!
Fittingly, one birthday gift from my mother was an unbirthday graphic T featuring the 1951 Disney Alice with the text "Happy Un-Birthday to Me." Here are a few different ways I have worn it in various seasons...and I just realized that I've consistently worn it on my unbirthday!
Birthday Outfits
As for what I wear on or around my actual birthday, here's a round up from the last several years:
Birthdays at Work
One of the weirdest examples of birthday-related unfairness I've encountered was at work. At one job early in my career (perhaps 3 years after graduating from college), our boss decided that the department would go out for lunch once a month and people who had their birthday that month would get a free meal with everyone else kicking in extra to cover it. I thought this was a terrible idea, but other people liked the idea so we did it. Our boss put the birthday meal on her credit card, then sent an email later telling us how much we each owed to cover our portion of it. Yes, the birthday person could choose something a bit pricier than usual, but it wasn't too bad for the first few months.
Then we hit July, which was when literally half of our department had their birthday...which created the scenario I had been worried about. When you put all the costs of the birthday meals together and divided it out, everyone without a July birthday paid for their own meal plus the entirety of a July person's meal. And all the July people had egged each other on to order expensive options.
When our boss's email arrived telling us non-July people that we each owed $27 (in 1999 dollars; that would be $54 today) to cover the birthday cost, people freaked out. None of us lower-level employees had the kind of money to fork that over easily. And a number of people were living paycheck to paycheck with every penny accounted for, and they sometimes had to skip meals to afford to eat out with the group at all (which was its own problem). One of my co-workers truly broke down in tears because her share of the July birthday expense was her grocery money for the week. And regardless of their own personal financial situation, the non-July people were rightly upset at the unfairness of it.
I volunteered to talk to the head of the department about it, and luckily she was math savvy enough to quickly see how unfair it was. (She should have seen this potential problem in advance - I know I did - but whatever.) Fortunately she also realized that the only way to make this right for people was to cover the July birthday meals herself rather than forcing poorly paid people to do it.
If you're not seeing the issue, consider that people with July birthdays not only got their birthday meal covered, which was the intention; they also got their share of the other July birthdays covered by the non-July people. This increased the financial burden on the non-July birthdays a lot.
After that fiasco, we went with the much better practice of having a cake (paid for by the managers) once a month to celebrate birthdays instead.
Speaking of weird birthday-at-work stories, I'm not sure anything can top the situation submitted to Ask A Manager in which a company gives employees an extra holiday to be taken on their birthday or the first work day following the birthday and a gift card for a restaurant...except for the employee born on February 29, Leap Day. The manager writing in seems to think that in years without a Leap Day, the employee doesn't have a birthday and thus they should stop complaining that they don't get the perk that everyone else does. The short article is worth reading to see the manager's response to the columnist's response!
Thanks for joining me in this consideration of birthdays and unbirthdays through the lens of a December baby.
Now check out what other bloggers have to say about birthdays:
Debbie: Debbie seems to be attending a lot of birthday parties lately!
Marsha: As Marsha contemplates a milestone birthday, she writes about memorable past birthdays as well as her plans for the next year.
Suzy: Suzy writes about the joys and challenges of having a Boxing Day birthday.
Leslie: Leslie is sharing the birth-days of the 2 babies that made her mommy.
Cat: Cat doesn't celebrate birthdays, so she had to drag out some ooold memories.
Amy: Amy loves celebrating birthdays of family and friends and wants to design her own perfect day!
Now over to you...are there any special challenges or advantages to when your birthday falls? Have you ever celebrated your birthday other than on/around the actual day? Do you celebrate every year or do you sometimes (or always) skip it?
Blogs I link up with are listed here.
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