The problem starts at Easter. It’s tempting, we know: there’s a mountain of aphrodisiac (chocolate) shaped into potent fertility symbols (eggs) and prodigiously reproducing animals (bunnies). Plus the truly devout have just spent a month abstaining… so it’s easy to fall into the sticky, chocolaty, heteronormative arms of another and, well, make babies.
But these poor Easter foetuses are cursed, CURSED we tell you, by a pitiable, life-staining fate: a birthday at Christmastime. Before you unite your Good Friday gametes, put yourself in the shoes of your future child.
First, your name will reflect your shame. You will be dubbed Christopher or Christine after the little baby Jeebus (who, scholars tell us, was actually born in September). Or maybe Nicholas, or Rudolph, or Frosty. Or perhaps your mother will nickname you ‘Pud’ because you’re her little Christmas pudding; and, because we all grow into our names, you will be a plump, overcooked child with an unnatural attachment to baked goods.
Next come the primary school years. You will dutifully attend your peers’ happy, thronging birthday parties all the year through. But when yours rolls around, they’re all holidaying in Bali, or Byron Bay, or the Barwon Heads caravan park. No party. No reciprocal presents. No fair.
The presents, when they come, IF they have not been subsumed into some sort of abominable ‘combined Christmas-birthday’ chimera, will be wrapped in Christmas paper. They might even be under a Christmas tree. But don’t bother opening them: all the good toys were sold out, and you're left with the obscure Star Wars characters like Snaggletooth, who admittedly will be worth a lot in 30 or so years but that doesn't really help you now.
When you grow up, your colleagues will not wish you many happy returns. No, their pity is all you get: 'You poor thing! Must suck having a birthday so close to Christmas.' Then, because they’re too stuffed with mince pies and Lindt reindeers that we all know are repackaged rabbits, they won’t eat any of the birthday cake that you’re still required to bring in under Australian workplace law. That’s if they haven’t already pissed off to Barwon Heads.
Don’t think you can have any fun outside work either, because your nearest and dearest already have 36,573 Christmas parties to go to. They won’t come. But it’s alright, because you wouldn’t be able to go out anywhere anyway since everything’s either booked out or closed. Which leaves you at home alone, with nothing on telly except Home Alone.
And it will be stinking hot.
SO STOP THERE, you fornicating Easter bunny. Be tempted not by those hot buns, leave those Easter eggs unfertilised, and stop this cruelty in its tracks: simply do not procreate in the third month of the year.
And spare some Xmas cheer for the unfortunate extant Chrises and Puds who never asked to be born in late December. Discard your foam antlers, divest yourself of tinsel, decline an RSVP and just wish them a plain old secular happy birthday.
CHRIS @astrocave and PUD @cakehelmit
The sell-out one-man two-hour monologue Alone starred George Rignold as Colonel Challice, a bitter, unhappy Colonel called Challice whose friends always pissed off to Barwon Heads at Christmas and missed his birthday party. The controversial ending involved the Colonel smearing birthday cake all over his body and hurling handfuls of Christmas pudding at the audience. George Rignold as Colonel Challice in 'Alone', chalk lithograph by Richard Wendel, printed by Troedel & Co. lithographers, 1878. State Library of Victoria, H2000.180/77