When the doctor told me that my due date was Christmas Eve when I was newly pregnant with Eli, I thought it was so fun. What a wonderfully happy time around Christmas to welcome such a beautiful gift into the world. I love Christmas time and I was so into it.
When people would find out my due date, I received all kinds of advice on how to handle a "Christmas baby". Some people advised always celebrating his birthday on his half birthday in June. Some suggested celebrating a week early or later or even on Christmas day so that the family was already together. Some people just laughed and said they were sorry for my unborn child whose birthday would always be lumped into the Christmas festivities. (Yes.. I'm serious.)
I should say though that this advice from seemingly all over the place, never really registered with me because never did I ever imagine I would still be pregnant or have my baby that close to Christmas. Caleb was born two weeks early (and research shows that second babies are commonly born earlier than the first) so I assumed we would be nice and cozy at home on Christmas Eve with our one or two week old baby.
Yeah... that didn't happen. As the days inched closer to the Christmas holiday and I was still pregnant, I started thinking of the very real possibility that he may actually be born closer to the holiday than I ever imagined. I was indeed still pregnant on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day (and the day after Christmas for those keeping tabs).
Our sweet boy was born on December 27th, three days after the predicted due date. As we are nearing his first birthday, we have already been asked about how we are going to handle it. Kind of a funny question (although completely valid, I totally get it) and Josh and I thought about it for awhile, taking into account how we would schedule our Christmas plans before the answer seemed completely obvious.
December 27th is not two days after Christmas in our house. December 27th is Eli's birthday. And like any other birthday, we would celebrate it as such. Is it the easiest thing to do when we are always traveling for Christmas and often are not home on the 26th? Absolutely not. It's also not the most popular thing to do because both of our families (who we don't live in the same city as) understandably want to get to spend time with us for Christmas. But for us, it's the right thing to wake up in our own beds on December 27th and celebrate our little guy. And we will continue to do so until he is of an appropriate age to tell us what he prefers.
Never will I ever allow his birthday to be less celebrated than anyone else's or to be lumped into Christmas festivities. It may not be right for everyone, but it is right for us.
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