It’s a busy month for birthdays

Today is Presidents’ Day. It is also my nephew Jadyn’s birthday. I find it hard to believe that he is 24 years old already. It seems like it was just yesterday that he was dancing around the card table at Mom’s while the rest of us cheated at cards. He gave a play by play description of the action that could be heard halfway down the street. 

It seems like yesterday that I was slicing an onion while he watched. I made cuts horizontally and vertically so that when I sliced it, tiny diced squares tumbled onto the table. He was very impressed. I told myself that it was easy to impress a three year old. 

Even longer ago he was a tiny baby with silky, strawberry blonde hair. Over the years his hair has thickened and turned into a nice gingery shade of red. When he lets his beard grow, it is a copper color and is quite bushy. Both of his grandmothers and several other ancestors on both sides of the family had red hair thus he came by the color naturally.

His is not the only February birthday.

Mine was last week, and as I said, Jadyn’s is today. My brother, Michael and his son also share February birthdays. My sister-in-law and two of her granddaughters were lucky enough to be born in the shortest month of the year. 

My family used to get together at the end of the month to celebrate them all. I miss baking a cake and some cookies to take to Mom’s. I even miss her calling a week or so later to tell me that she finally finished off the last of the cookies. 

One time I made the mistake of taking a cake to Mom’s on my birthday. She was upset with me and told me that Michael was hurt that I didn’t come on his birthday. I asked Michael about it later and he said he didn’t care. 

It seems that most families have birthday’s clustered in a particular month. Ours just happens to be February. My daughter’s family in Texas seems to have most of their birthdays in March. No matter when the day is chosen to celebrate, it is a day set aside to honor the birthday boy or girl with cake and sometimes presents. 

Later this month we are going to try to meet up with our niece and her family to celebrate that batch of birthdays. We were invited to go to one of the little one’s parties a couple weeks or so ago. We were looking forward to seeing family members whom we hadn’t seen for awhile. As luck would have it, we both developed a bad cough and we opted to stay home and listen to each other cough instead of spreading our germs around to people we love. So far we are healthy and the visit is on. 

Presidents’ Day is supposed to honor all presidents, good and bad. Originally, February honored Abe Lincoln and George Washington only.

The rest of the presidents were on their own. Personally, I couldn’t tell you the birthday of any of the other presidents without looking it up. Lincoln and I share a birthday so I know when that is.

We used to celebrate Washington’s birthday on February 22. Now that we have renamed it Presidents’ Day we also changed the date to the third Monday in February. In 1971 we  passed the Uniform Federal Holidays Act to give ourselves more Mondays off. Washington’s birthday can now fall anywhere from February 15 to 21.

Although our family birthdays fall on specific dates we have no intention on grouping them together so we can have an extra Monday off. When the rest of the country is ignoring President’s Day we will be preparing for the latest round of birthdays. Anybody want to cheat at cards with me?