Sharing your birthday with Thanksgiving is not ideal

I'm a huge birthday celebrant. I think this is really the one time of the year when a person has the day to themselves. When I was pregnant with Ari I actually feared that he would be birthed on my birthday. I'm one of those horrible persons who just didn't want to share my birthday with my child. And thankfully I didn't.

But I digress. I'm also one of those people that is okay with getting older. Sure, I'd like to perpetually be 18 years old but that's not the way life goes. And unlike what my mother and several other family members and friends have done, I am not 'picking' an age and re-celebrating it year after year. I am one year older and I think its something to celebrate.

Tomorrow I'll be
And when that day is over I'll look excitedly to being 33 (which is by the way my favorite number.)

Yet every four years my birthday lands on the fourth Thursday of November. That means it lands on Thanksgiving day. So 'my' day becomes Thanksgiving day and it just not fun to share it even though Thanksgiving has all the rights to the 26th of November considering the first national Thanksgiving day was on November 26, 1789.

Lest you think I was being even more self centered then usual (really is that possible?) I assure you that I have YET to have an awesome Thanksgiving day birthday and that I personally don't think it's even possible. I have a litany of BAD thanksgiving day birthdays to recall including having my head thrust into a cake which sparked a huge fight, having something explode into a mass of blood within my eyeball, an immense series of arguments and family fights that have escalated to dangerous levels, etc. And no, something bad does not happen every year but I have an ideal birthday. This ideal changes from year to year but I can assure you that it never includes turkey, so much food that I'm rendered without an appetite (seriously, i barely eat anything on thanksgiving because the amount of food is a turn off), football and for just this year the cemetery (more on that later.)

This year my ideal would be to be surrounded by my kids and Rob. Open a present or two, maybe something they made, something that screams me as small or insignificant as it could be, and to spend my day in a quiet happiness of love enveloped, maybe go ice skating, maybe walk down 5th avenue in the city and take in the pre-Christmas fervor, or maybe, just maybe cuddling up in bed watching old Christmas movies. Simple. Comfortable. Me.