How can we make Christmas Day birthdays happy?

The last thing I want is for us to get in to the habit of chucking a candle on the festive pavlova and calling that a birthday.

By my reckoning, there’s only one birthday that is worse than my daughter’s, and that’s those who are born on leap day.

In fact, Statistics New Zealand backs me up by confirming that Christmas Day is the rarest birthday in the country behind February 29, and it’s not hard to understand why. Who would want to combine two of the best days of the year into one?

It doesn’t seem fair, especially for a wee one, where presents are basically life.

Although due around Christmas, I’d never entertained that my second child would actually be born on Christmas Day. So when I woke with the telltale signs of labour starting at 1am on Christmas Day last year, my husband thought I was pulling his leg.

We had definitely joked about GREER BERRY her making a festive arrival, but never thought it through to reality.

After a quick call to my midwife, which began with a very apologetic ‘I’m sorrrrrry’ and her assurance that she was still awake wrapping presents, we quickly made our way to hospital.

Just a few short hours later, she was here and we were ecstatic to complete our family with a girl, albeit still in shock that we had a pigeon pair.

We were home, introducing her to her big brother – just 14 months old himself at the time – by 8am that day and feasted on croissants and platters of food that arrived from neighbours and friends.

It was, quite frankly, the best Christmas ever – and I don’t imagine there are many people who can look back and have fond memories of birthing a posterior child without pain relief.

Once the adrenaline wore off, however, I couldn’t help repeating, ‘‘Oh my, we have a Christmas baby’’. That’s basically the same line I have repeated every few days over the past year when people ask how old she is and I reply: ‘‘She’s a Christmas Day baby’’, which I find is much easier than calculating her actual age.

As I’ve mulled over what it means to be the parent of a child born on Christmas Day, I did what all good mothers do and turned to Google. I’m sure Mary did the same in the stable contemplating little J-dude’s future.

My internet search discovered a number of themes with other families and Christmas babies. They included a) what a truly horrible birthday it is to have, b) that combining a Christmas and birthday gift was never OK, and c) don’t wrap birthday gifts in Christmas paper.

I can absolutely see all of those points, but it has been hard for me to try and put in place the appropriate ‘‘rules’’ to ensure our girl has her special day.

The last thing I want is for us to get in to the habit of chucking a candle on the festive pavlova and calling that a birthday. Yes, she’s only a baby and won’t know, but I feel like it’s one of those things we need to get in to the habit of avoiding before we get complacent.

It’s hard to ‘‘demand’’ things of people in her life though: ‘‘Thanks for the gift; PS, next time can you not use Christmas wrapping?’’ sounds awful, but I certainly appreciate people making the effort to separate the two events out.

Birthdays and Christmas are so important as kids and often shape a lot of our childhood memories, so we are pretty determined to ensure we try to get it as right as we can.

One thing we are doing this year is having a party this weekend – before everyone disappears on their holidays. She won’t remember it, but like with most first birthdays, we feel like it’s a bit of a celebration for the adults too.

I imagine these parties held before her actual birthday will become a mainstay for many years to come.

Another great tradition I read about was parents who, every Christmas Eve once the kids are in bed, change out the Christmas decorations on the tree to ‘‘birthday’’ decorations. The Christmas tree becomes the birthday tree. The birthday kid also gets a special area near the newly-decorated tree where they open their gifts, separately to everyone else ripping into their presents.

I really like this idea and it might be something we try out.

It might all sound horribly narcissistic, to have such a focus on something as materialistic as a birthday combining with such a commercial holiday, but to me it is about equal fairness for our kids.

Children yearn for their parents’ attention and acknowledgement and I would hate to think my girl thinks she is in any way treated differently just because she decided to bust out of my uterus on a national holiday.

Birthdays are about appreciation and saying, for at least one day a year, today is your day, I see you. You are special.

So this Christmas, while others will be looking out for the guy in the red suit, I’ll be happily looking at my little Christmas angel and reminiscing on a beautiful and crazy year it has been having her in our lives.