Birthdays are a touchy subject for me. December 22 is just too mucked up with holiday fever. I’ve whined about that before, so I won’t bore you with details of years past here. This year, with my birthday falling during Hanukkah and holiday celebrations the weekend before (Stephen’s family, for the annual pre-Christmas gathering) and after (my family’s coming over for Less-Oil Latkes on Saturday), it feels more like an afterthought than ever.
This morning Stephen and Harry woke me up with a gift—wrapped in the sweetest paper ever, designed by Harry himself. (At 5, he can’t read terribly well yet, so I forgive him for breaking the first rule of gift-giving for December birthdays.) Inside the box? A piece of paper, bearing a color printout of my gift. Apparently the package was misdelivered, and in the meanwhile the company ran out of stock so they couldn’t send a replacement. Sigh. My other present? A delicious-looking set of hand-thrown bowls I’ve been ogling for over a year. Yeah, those didn’t arrive either—the artist just emailed Stephen to say she wasn’t happy with the way they turned out so she had to redo them. They’ll arrive in several weeks. WTF? I blame this all on the holidays. If my birthday fell in, say, October, nobody would be rushing the stores and clearing out all the merchandise.
Whine whine whine. I know. This is all very First-World Problem-ish. I’ll shut up now.
Bah, humbug.
