What’s it like being born on Christmas Day? As you feverishly open your presents, spare a thought for those poor, forgotten children who have to share a birthday with the Baby Jesus.
While much of the world celebrates the Lord’s day, their own big day will be buried under tinsel and snow, marked only by a footnote on the Christmas card, or perhaps a candle on the Christmas cake.
When your birthday falls on Christmas Day, you may be shortchanged in the presents department, as each one becomes a “combined” Christmas and birthday present.
You may be denied a birthday party, because all your friends will have to stay at home and do family stuff.
Worst of all, you won’t be the centre of attention because you’ve been upstaged by that holy little twerp in the crib. Might as well crawl into a corner with a stale mince pie and try to forget you were ever born.
One chap who was born on Christmas Day counted back through the calendar, and concluded that his parents must have conceived him on St Patrick’s Day in a fit of patriotic exuberance.
Irish superstition
But perhaps it’s not all bad news. An Irish superstition has it that the child born on Christmas Day will enjoy great fortune. Several famous people were born on Christmas Day, including Humphrey Bogart, Annie Lennox, Sissy Spacek, Isaac Newton and Helena Christiansen, and that didn’t do their careers any harm.
And Christmas baby Shane MacGowan grew up to write arguably the greatest seasonal tune of all time, Fairytale of New York.
There's even a song for people whose birthday falls on December 25th. St Etienne's I Was Born on Christmas Day appeared on the band's Christmas '93 EP and featured guest vocals from The Charlatans' Tim Burgess. They weren't lying: band member Bob Stanley really was born on Christmas Day.
Writer, gay rights activist and former club DJ Tonie Walsh’s birthday clashed with that of JC, but he never felt left out of the celebrations.
“My parents were always organised enough to give me a double set of presents,” he recalls.
“So I got Christmas presents and birthday presents, and that would have been the case right up to when my mother died earlier this year.”
Formal birthday party
Although he never had a formal birthday party (he made an exception for his 25th), Walsh never felt upstaged by the baby Jesus – in fact, he was more concerned he might upstage the Saviour.
“Although I quietly enjoyed the love and attention I got from my parents, I was always a little bit mortified when people made an extra special effort to remember my birthday, because it felt a bit needy, and detracted from the Christmas jollies. I hated being singled out because it was my birthday.”
A believer
Walsh was very much a believer in his younger days, and each Christmas morning he would do readings at his local church, St Mary’s in Irishtown, Clonmel.
“It hugely appealed to the innate show-off in me, performing on the altar in front of a captive audience.
“When I finally came out, ironically in the year of Pope John Paul’s visit to Ireland, I was one of those people waving a flag in the Phoenix Park, that was the high point of my connection with organised religion. And what really sundered my connection was getting to grips with my gayness and realising that the church had no place for gay people.”
Sharing a birthday with Jesus does not necessarily give you a Messiah complex, but Walsh admits he always had a desire to change the world.
“I grew up with this overweening desire to better things around me and for other people. Which is probably what motivated my interest in gay civil rights. So I don’t know if there’s a loose connection, but I’ll just put it out there.”
‘One last hurrah’
Speaking before this year’s birthday, Walsh said: “I’m looking forward to my birthday – this will be the last one we’ll have in Clonmel, in the family home that we’ve had since the 1970s.
“We’re having one last hurrah, a Ukrainian-Irish dinner, I’m having the big love of my life with a few Ukrainian and Latvian friends down. We’ll say goodbye to the house and maybe salute my birthday along the way as well. It’s another reason to make a big deal about it.”
Happy birthday, Tonie, Annie, Sissy, Helena, Bob and Shane.
