Doc Happy as Thanksgiving
Child of hippies
ST PAUL, Minn, Nov 27, (AP): This week you can wish happy Thanksgiving and happy birthday to Happy Thanksgiving.
If that sentence didn’t make much sense, it’s probably because you don’t know Happy Thanksgiving Reynolds, a family physician from Minneapolis, who was born 43 years ago in late November. “I was the child of hippies,” Reynolds said. And not just the occasional bellbottom, beadwearing hippies, according to Reynolds. They were a hard-core, tofu-making, coop founding couple who didn’t have a name picked out for their new baby because they believed in letting the universe help choose the name on the day of her birth.
“It was total universe magic time for them,” Reynolds told the St. Paul Pioneer Press.
So when the day happened to be Thanksgiving, the universe seemed to be deciding that Reynolds’ first and middle names should be Happy Thanksgiving. The first snowfall of the season also occurred that day, Reynolds said.
“I narrowly missed the name Snow,” she said.
Gift
Reynolds said her name has been an “unintentional gift.”
She isn’t shy about using her full name in her professional life. After medical school, “I said, ‘You know what, I’m Dr Happy Thanksgiving Reynolds’. That’s just who I am.”
She’s gotten job interviews because people want to meet someone named Happy Thanksgiving. “I’m someone you’re not going to forget based on the name,” she said.
Christmas Eve Oberlander feels something similar about her name.
“It’s been wonderful,” said the interior designer from Lake Minnetonka. “I’ve always loved my name.”
Oberlander was born 14 minutes before midnight on Dec 24 almost 67 years ago in Fargo, ND. Her parents thought that was meaningful enough to name her for the occasion.
“They were fun like that,” she said.
Depending on the situation, she sometimes goes by Chris, Chrissie or Christie. “One of my brother’s friends called me Tree. After Christmas tree,” she said.
But she said family members generally call her Christmas.
“I think if I had been shy about it, I might have been cheesed off by it, but I always loved it,” she said. “I always get a very positive reaction.”
Oberlander said while she’s met plenty of Hollys and Noels, she’s never met another Christmas Eve.
But another child born on Dec 24, 1946, the same day as Oberlander, ended up named Mary Christmas.
Mary Christmas Pierson, a Minneapolis resident born in Burlington, Wis., said most of the time she’s just Mary Pierson, but “every time someone sees a driver’s license or anything like that, like a library card, they always make some kind of comment. Most of the time, it’s a positive one.”
“Even TSA agents, they will look at that passport, they’ll chuckle and get that slight smile on their face,” she said.
Attention
As a child, she enjoyed the extra attention teachers sometimes would give her because of her name, but she said her “little roughneck Midwestern farm kid” classmates weren’t so kind to “little Mary Christmas.”
“All my teachers loved it, and all my classmates made fun of it,” she said.
In her mid-20s, Pierson gave herself the nickname Kitty, not because she didn’t like Mary, but in honor of a favorite aunt, Catherine. She later shortened that to Kit, because “I worked at a veterinary hospital for a while, and that became a problem because there were so many kitties around.”
But, Mary Christmas said, “In general, it’s been a good name.”
“I think they thought it would be fun,” said Merry Eve Daher of her parents’ decision to name her in honor of when she showed up, just before midnight Dec 31, 1955. Daher, a Burnsville resident, said her parents also may have run out of ideas after naming six previous children.