It took awhile to get pregnant with Boy Wonder. His was a planned pregnancy; so while we were in the throes of attempting conception I was keenly aware of the potential due dates with each passing month. I charted and planned and generally obsessed over timing.

After a year of trying, it became apparent that no amount of planning was going to make this easy. And that fateful day finally arrived when we had to make a decision, “Do we skip trying to get pregnant this month to avoid having a December baby or do we not waste an opportunity and live with the consequences?” Oh the discussions around this question. IZ was all for trying…that should go without explanation. I wasn’t so sure. I’d known plenty of people who had December birthdays and to the one they hated it. I’d yet to meet a person who thought sharing their birthday with Jesus and Santa was a good idea. Now, it’s one thing if it just happens that way—but we were deliberately attempting to get pregnant. That made it seem worse, for some reason.

I won the argument. We put off trying that month and found ourselves pregnant the very next month. I felt vindicated in my decision. We would be having a late January baby—even if he came a wee bit early, we would be missing the whole Christmas/New Year season. I couldn’t have been more relieved and besides, I liked the idea of January. A beginning of the year baby for a new beginning to life. There was symmetry in the notion that appealed to my type A++ personality.

IZ spent my pregnancy teasing me… “You know, he could be early…” He’d rub my belly stirring up kicking feet inside, “You want to be Daddy’s little tax deduction, don’t you?!” I was not amused. At the time, a close friend was pregnant with her second child, also a boy. Her baby was due late December and even she would look at me and say, “You know, it could happen. I just have this feeling.” Why was I the only person worked up over the notion of a December baby?

This pregnancy was difficult—but as sick as I was with all the complications, I was just happy to BE pregnant. We’d known loss before. So, when I developed PIH over the Thanksgiving holiday that year, it became very clear that my January baby was going to be coming early. The question was, how early?

The answer was five weeks. Bed rest had bought me a good month more of pregnancy, so we avoided all the complications typically associated with premature babies. Boy Wonder was born after an arduous labor three days before Christmas. The nurses scrounged up a red beanie for his head and dubbed him their Christmas elf. It seems, my boy was destined to share his birthday with Jesus and Santa after all. It was going to have to be ok, because, it just happened that way.  How like me to over think what should have been a basic biological response. Evidently, you can be too prepared!

And that, dear readers, is how I ended up decorating our Christmas tree in balloons, streamers, and little number Ones for his first birthday. Each year we do it a little differently than the year before. This year, we made Alicia’s origami lights and strung them on his tree. But tradition holds that we cut out numbers for the age he is turning and decorate them. Then, his birthday tree stays decorated until his official birthday on the 22nd. It seems only fitting that my Christmas baby should get a Birthday tree each year. If you have to share your big day with God Incarnate and a jolly red Saint, you might as well go big!