Birthday of the Blues

Merry Christmas James O’Malley! And oh yeah, by the way, Happy Birthday, too.

Sharing the traditional birthday with Jesus of Nazareth is a special honor for Christians, a date few forget. And you get twice the presents too, right?

Wrong, says the Temple City resident.

“It seemed like a rip-off at the time because everybody was worried about Santa Claus,” O’Malley recalled of his childhood Christmases in Chicago. Today he celebrates his 40th birthday. One Christmas, he says jokingly, his family thought they were being funny.

“I’d get two gifts,” O’Malley said. “Like one box with one sock and another box with the other sock.”

For some who celebrate a Christmas birthday or a birthday holiday or a “holibirthday,” sharing a birthday on one of the holiest days of the year is like receiving a sack of coal.

O’Malley, one of nine children, has an older brother born on New Year’s Eve, a sister born on the Fourth of July and another brother on Labor Day. In a family that size with little spending money, he says, holidays and birthdays blurred into one. For the first time in his life, however, his mother sent him an early birthday card this year. Not a Christmas-themed one either. Just a birthday card.

The folks who have birthdays around the holidays say it would be nice to deck the halls with a birthday cake and maybe jingle a few bells to a couple rounds of “Happy Birthday.”

“It’s like a double-edged sword,” said Claude Eshaghian of West Los Angeles. “I don’t get double the gifts, but you almost get double the attention. Whenever there’s a Christmas party on Christmas, they’ll call it my birthday.”

Eshaghian will celebrate his 28th birthday today. He is Jewish, but he said his mother called him her Christmas present.

“I tend to become bipolar around this time of year,” he said.

And if being born on Christmas Day seems overrated, those born a few days before or after feel just as deprived.

“You always feel very cheated, especially as a child,” said Michele Buttelman of Canyon Country. On her eighth birthday in Washington state, she remembers dressing up in a party dress, expecting guests to arrive for her birthday. But because of a winter storm, no one came.

That was one silent night she still can’t forget, said Buttelman, who celebrated her 43rd birthday Dec. 19. She said each year she pesters family and friends to separate her birthday from Christmas.

“I just torture my friends, and make sure someone takes me out to lunch,” she said. “Birthdays should be a special time of the year. No matter how many people share your birthday, it’s still your day. When you’re so close to Christmas, there’s so much going on, you don’t get that attention.”

Pia Bergstrom of Santa Monica will celebrate her 23rd birthday on Sunday, midway between Christmas and New Year’s Day.

“I’m over it now, but when I was younger, people were never interested in attending my birthday parties,” said Bergstrom, a Swedish-born nanny. She said she has received several packages from Sweden that serve as both a birthday and Christmas present. But she said there is a bright side to this: “I can choose which day to open them.”

Greeting card manufacturers have taken note of the December dilemma for those born that month and have discovered a new market.

American Greetings offers 12 kinds of December birthday cards, some of them humorous. And a Hallmark official said sales from last year show that more than 1 million people purchased Christmas/birthday cards. Demand for those cards keeps increasing, the company said.

Beverly Hills psychotherapist Don Fleming said parents of children who have birthdays in December should try to set aside a special time during the month, so the child’s sense of being is not swept away.

“It’s like some may be think they are losing their identity” because everyone is concentrating on the holidays, he said. “[The birthday] loses its specialness. It minimizes their sense of who they really are. Their sense of wanting to feel special and focused on is there, but Santa Claus takes that day away.”

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Santa Claus may have skimped on the presents for these folks, but some Dec. 25 birthday notables seemed to get over it, such as American Red Cross founder Clara Barton, “Twilight Zone” creator Rod Serling and rock singer Annie Lennox.

And all this anxiety about missing out on presents overshadows another consideration--women who had to give birth on Christmas Day.

“Mom got stuck with a baked potato and everyone else got a great dinner,” O’Malley said.

“My mom was in labor for a long time, so dad went home and had a turkey sandwich,” said Oxnard resident Chris Roth, a naval officer who turns 40 today. “That’s a heck of a way to spend Christmas.”

Mickey Williams, director of diagnostic imaging at Good Samaritan Hospital, turns 57 today, but he is not bothered very much by getting only one gift.

“I was born in a Third World country, Jamaica, so I really didn’t know otherwise,” he said. “Money was the only gift I ever wanted.”

Still, Williams’ mother would kid him about his special birthday.

“Until the day my mother passed away,” he said, “she reminded me that I was born during the best Christmas dinner she was about to have. And she had to miss it.”