Read You Better Not Cry: Stories for Christmas for Free Online Page B

through life with a birthday the day after Christmas.
    Sure, other kids had lousy birthdays, too. Like Mark, whose birthday was in the no-man’s-land of
March,
or that hog-faced Bertha from up in the fourth grade who was born on February second—Groundhog Day. But these were just run-of-the-mill cruddy birthdays.
    Glen suffered an actual birth defect. And that’s why no matter whose birthday we were celebrating, it was always Glen who went home with the last Twinkie, even though he protested. “Aw, c’mon, don’t make me take it, please? It’s bad enough already with everybody feeling so sorry for me.”
    “Nonsense,” the teacher would say, cramming the greasy, cream-filled sponge log into his backpack while we all looked at him with pity, weak smiles on our lips, tears glittering in the teacher’s eyes.
    But because there is the slum in India, so, too, must there be Beverly Hills.
    I had an October birthday. October twenty-third. This was the calendar’s finest piece of real estate. Mine was the Rodeo Drive of birthdays.
    The
only-in-the-way
spring birthdays were long past as were those pesky, mosquito-bitten summer birthdays. September was a somber month as summer’s death was mourned. But by mid-October everyone was suddenly ready for the fall.
    The air was refreshing. People were excited about Halloween. But they were not distracted by it, consumed with it. They were not cutting down trees and making lists and worrying about money. Everybody was happy because everybody—even the grown-ups—would soon get to have some candy.
    And when you had a birthday on October twenty-third, there was always something to talk about at your birthday party: “What are you gonna be this year? I was a bat last year. I’m going as a toothbrush this time.” Plus, nobody could skimp on your presents because you were still far enough away from Christmas.
    I didn’t care a thing about Halloween. In fact, it always made me feel a little foolish. It seemed to me that if you were going to be in costume, there should be a studio audience. I saw my October birthday merely as the very first step on the grand staircase to Christmas.
    But I lived for Christmas.
    And once my birthday arrived, it was only one slippery week until Halloween had come and gone. And then there was nothing in the way of Christmas.
    If you didn’t count that annoying Thanksgiving, which I absolutely did not.
    I despised those pilgrims with their buckle shoes and their coffin clothes. I resented having to study them in class and then be forced to delay Christmas festivities until their stupid canned-cranberry-sauce holiday was over.
    Likewise, I hated the Indians for not slaughtering them all.
    Thanksgiving was nothing more than a pilgrim-created obstacle in the way of Christmas; a dead bird in the street that forced a brief detour.
    While I no longer believed in Santa at the age of nine, I did believe in
giving.
    And as far as I was concerned, my parents would give me whatever I wanted. It was my payment for enduring the other 364 days of the year with them. Between my nasty drunk father and my suicidal, mental-patient mother, I felt I was owed certain reimbursements. They had aged me; I would drain them dry.
    Beginning December first, I became like a young network executive; trying to organize a thousand different things at once, establishing lists of priorities, creating fallback plans and passing these documents along to those who
would make it happe
n—my parents.
    “It’s just a first draft,” I told them as they sat stone-faced at the kitchen table, my mother’s strained, medicated eyes focused on the salt and pepper shakers and my father, as usual, barely glancing up from his college students’ exam booklets.
    I slid the document onto the table between them. Neatly printed along the top was the title,
STOCKING STUFFERS: YOUR OPTIONS
, followed by a list of acceptable items.
     
    14K gold electroplate LED watch (Mountain Farms Mall)
OR
Bag of