A lifetime of Christmas birthdays have taught me to not approach a birthday with too much enthusiasm. Brinn begins his birthday celebrations on June 1st and carries on with his revelry until the 30th. He’s never had to experience the disappointment that Capricorns suffer every year.

1. As an adult, I get it. As a money conscious adult with many loved ones to shop for, I really get it. As a child, I did not get it. Why did my brother get a load of presents every August and December, while I only get the same load as him in December?
2. How do you explain to a 10 year old that friends will not be attending her birthday party because the roads are frozen over? The weather more often than not screws over any Christmas baby’s plans.
3. What do you do for inexpensive entertainment with 20 or more people when it’s 20 degrees out, possibly sleeting? Summer babies just invite their pals to the back yard for a cookout and lounging around in lawn chairs. December babies?
4. Sweets are kind of overrated at this point. We’ve all stuffed ourselves silly with desserts from the dinners on Christmas Eve and Christmas day, candy from our stockings, the dessert table at the work/school/club functions, and then there’s always leftovers. By the time we make it around to December 27th, no ones particularly feeling the need to ingest more heartburn inducing sugar.
5. Clean up: our living room has a tree in it, baby Jesus and Santa smile from every shelf, the refrigerator is full of leftovers, and we just ripped apart enough paper to kill a few acres of the rainforest. But now we have just one day to perform a massive redecorating miracle and prepare Pinterest worthy party food.

And Brinn wonders why I struggle to share his enthusiasm for birthday bashes. But this year things finally turned around for this child of Epiphany. The weather reached 70 degrees on December 27th and the sun came out –all at the same time! So for the first in my 32 years, we actually had a bbq on my birthday!  You have no idea how exciting it can be to sit on the deck to eat a hamburger on your day of birth, unless you were born near the winter solstice.

So while the grilled food and outdoor socializing were fabulous, December still has the shortest days of the year. With daylight fading quickly, I still needed an indoor activity for my 32nd birthday party. Enter paint. What better way to repaint a room than lure friends to your home with promises of free food. But painting with brushes would be too pedestrian for a celebration, so we improvised. Paint filled water balloons would have been great, but another December woe is finding water balloons on the shelves. So we had to settle for regular balloons, which do not explode when coliding with drywall. So we improvised and hung paint filled balloons up…and took turns shooting them the b.b. gun!

Hope your Decembers found you as warm and filled with hamburger as ours.