Holidays serve as family’s birthday reminders

FOR most people, fall heralds the coming of the holiday season. In the Sinon household, it means birthday season; one after another, in succession from the oldest to the youngest.
The Husband kicks it off with a mid-November birthday, and a mere five days later, along comes mine. He likes to remind me that he is a whole year and five days older than me, and therefore has had much more life experience and was potty trained first. I remind him that he will also be back in diapers a whole year and five days before me, too. That coin has two sides.
 Next comes our daughter, The Girl. While we think her birthday is nicely wedged between Christmas and New Year’s, she doesn’t. She feels birthday presents wrapped in Christmas paper are just leftover Christmas presents, and that whoever—most likely me—handed her such an atrocity, should immediately pony up a different present in proper birthday wrapping paper.
In her childhood, we assured her that everyone was just celebrating her birthday on New Year’s Eve. Why yes, Dick Clark was in fact televising New York’s celebration of her birth.
Our son, The Boy, shares his birthday with two very momentous occasions. He was born on our wedding anniversary but no, there was no sitcom-esque mad dash to the hospital after the “I dos,” but arrived eight years later to the day. Even more importantly, it’s also Groundhog Day. Fun Fact: The Husband picked our
wedding date.
We do try to make sure that The Boy’s birthday is celebrated properly during the day, and then we observe our anniversary on the p.m.
dinner shift.
I feel for him. No kid should have to think of their parents’ wedding night on their birthday.
I can relate to The Girl though as that my birthday actually falls
on Thanksgiving.
As a kid, it was great. Mom pulled out the good dishes, monogrammed silver, and even made giant prawn cocktails as an appetizer to be eaten with the special forks. All of this fanfare was obviously for me. Wait, why are there construction paper hand turkeys on the table again? Oh, yeah.
As an adult, Thanksgiving and my birthday colliding isn’t nearly as much fun, and all of that fanfare is definitely not for me, because there is
no fanfare.
Just a cold, slippery turkey that
I may or may not have helped The Husband wrestle into a giant brine pot and exploding, fork-pierced sweet potatoes that I need a hammer and a chisel
to clean up inside the microwave for the casserole.
Even more unceremoniously, one year we pre-ordered a deep-fried turkey from a national fried chicken chain that claims that apparently, licking one’s fingers is more appealing than say, using a napkin, but shhh…don’t tell anyone. I may have gone to pick it up wearing a hat and dark glasses.
So, if you see us on the street, “Happy holidays” is nice, but “Happy Birthday” is even better.