Being Catholic and having a birthday on Dec. 29 -- between Christmas and New Year's Eve -- has its drawbacks. For one thing, your birthday is never distinct. It's always Jesus Christ taking all the spotlight from you every December. Nobody will ever put a little ceramic Nativity set out for you. Year after year you feel like the forsaken son. Presents everywhere and all of them are going to someone else in recognition of someone else's birthday. When I was younger, I always wondered every holiday season, "Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, why did You have to be born today? If Your dad created the universe, why not extend Mary's pregnancy so she could have her kid sometime like June. June would be great -- every kid gets presents right when school lets out. Much better than December. Heavenly Father, don't you know that there are other kids -- not just your kid -- being born this time of year?"
Infinitely worse is the delicate situation of revealing this fact to your forgetful relatives. It's a Catch-22. If you don't tell them, then it would be a total drought of presents for the whole year. But if you do tell them, then they take advantage of the situation and simply give you a slightly larger present than your siblings or, even worse, put a birthday card with the Christmas card and designate the same Christmas present as a birthday present too.
How convenient. Jesus Christ and Little Matthew, sons of God and Carlos Soriano, born within a week of each other and negating the need to think up a whole new present or even go to another party. Some relatives, when confronted with the embarrassment of forgetting a nephew's birthday, would simply pull out their wallets and stick $50 in my shirt pocket, chuckling nervously, hoping to avoid the scorn of a spurned child.
To be totally fair, none of this holiday unpleasantness is their fault. It's not my fault either. I didn't choose to be born on Dec. 29. The party who holds the most blame would probably be my parents, who obviously lacked the foresight to use birth control and save their unborn children from the annual angst of birthdays lost in the Santa Shuffle. That sort of thing should have been blatantly obvious when they decided to go about continuing the family lines. They've tried to make it up to me -- to their credit, they've been celebrating my birthday in February for the past 13 years.
Of course, life goes on beyond Christmas. There are 11 other months of the year and years themselves that pass by. And I've been mellowing with age and feeling real appreciation for the convenience of saving myself the hassle of remembering my own birthday. Your life gets all cluttered up and suddenly it's a blessing to know that your birthday is four days away from Christmas. It's just like having your mother's maiden name as your Blitzmail password -- one less thing to forget.
Indeed, I've even been turning around on the issue a bit as increasing age meant obligations to give rather than receive at Christmas. I think that one of the creeping signs of maturity is that we start to take pride in the presents we give at Christmas rather than what we get. At a certain age it seems childish to extort possessions from our parents. At the same time, it seems more mature to perceive others' needs and fill them. We live for those words "It's just what I wanted," that joy that comes from the happiness of others.
They say that Christmas exists just for children. We all know the typical reason why we give presents at Christmas -- because of the gifts of the Three Magi. The gold, frankincense and myrrh were the treasures of great kingdoms brought to this humble manger for the Son of God. At Mass last Christmas Eve a perceptive priest turned this on its edge and showed us that the real present was Jesus himself -- God's son sent to the firmament. The celebrant of the very first birthday wasn't receiving -- he was giving.
Transcending acquisitiveness in the holiday season has helped me realize the particular honor of having a birthday near Christmas. If Christmas is about giving, than a birthday is best left forgotten. Who needs yet another day of cake and presents when one could revel in the pleasure of tiny nieces gleefully tearing the paper off a wooden train set?
Watching my three-year-old niece push her train around the track that I made up for her, I realize that the circle of life is turning around. There is a famous biblical quote that goes "I became a man and put away childish things" (Paul 13:11). Every Christmas we put away childish things and give them to children.
