The particular pain of a January birthday

Every January baby knows the particular sting of watching the world pack up its joy. The tree comes down, the lights go dark and everyone retreats into hibernation — just in time for your birthday. You unwrap presents that feel suspiciously like leftover Christmas gifts. There's even research confirming what every January baby suspects: People spend less on our birthday presents.

I grew up in New Jersey, so my birthday often involved snow, slush, darkness, intolerable wind chills, sleet, a blizzard or some combination of all of the above. By the time my birthday rolled around, the first month of the year seemed like a calendar page to suffer through, not a time for celebration.

I was a fairly happy kid with a mostly happy childhood, but none of my three siblings or parents had winter birthdays. They couldn’t understand.

By the time I was in middle school, I’d had enough. When my parents asked how I wanted to celebrate my 13th birthday, I couldn’t stomach another ice skating party. “I wish it was warm on my birthday!” I whined. “I wish I could go to the beach.”

My family, God love them, didn’t hear an exasperated bratty tween. They heard the momentary despair of someone sick and tired of New Jersey winters and after-thought birthdays. They heard a challenge, and they sprang into action. They heard the clarion call and answered with the most epic basement beach party anyone could hope for.

My older sister, the family’s party planner, led the charge. Our unfinished basement was the last place anyone would want to have a party, but those ugly green metal columns? They became palm trees. We drew pictures of jellyfish and waves to cover the dingy walls. Ironically, there was already a picnic table in the middle of the room, which my grandfather, who emigrated from Ukraine and lived with us until he died, made with his own two hands. I had never appreciated my grandfather’s craftsmanship because the table was always covered with laundry. But with all the laundry baskets hidden away, the picnic table transformed into a spectacular ice cream sundae bar, complete with caramel and chocolate sauces, rainbow sprinkles and cans of whipped cream that I’m sure someone squirted directly into their mouth.

But the best part of all, the thing that elevated the party from quirky to legendary, was the sand. To this day, I don’t remember who thought of sand. And I can’t believe my immigrant parents, who always prioritized the essential and the practical, went along with this crazy idea. We spread huge pieces of plastic tarp across the basement floor. And somehow my dad secured sand. I can still picture him lugging those black buckets packed with sand, two at a time, the metal handles slicing into his palms as he trudged across the driveway and down to the basement. My siblings and I excitedly tore off the lids as if ripping through wrapping paper and dumped heaps of sand onto the carefully placed tarp, which we thought would make clean-up easier. (It didn’t.)

The party was perfect — a bunch of tween girls, dressed in shorts and T-shirts, dancing to beach music and giggling and playing limbo in a sand-covered, unheated basement on a cold and gloomy winter afternoon. But what sticks with me is the party planning, the thrill of pursuing and pulling off what seemed like the wildest idea any of us ever had, and the ways in which my family, with their fall and spring birthdays, rallied to support me.

[T]he best part of all, the thing that elevated the party from quirky to legendary, was the sand.

Now all these years later, officially ensconced in middle age, I'm grateful for my birthday, even if it is in January. Boston in January is just as dark, cold and dreary as I remember it being in New Jersey. But I understand now what I couldn't then: The magnitude of my parents, immigrants who'd each crossed an ocean and built a life focused on the essentials, saying yes to sand in the basement. They said yes to the impractical. To the messy. To the absurd. They said yes because sometimes love means creating summer in the middle of winter. Sometimes it means hauling metal buckets until your palms sting and believing that joy — even the temporary, sand-everywhere kind — is essential too.

I try to remember these lessons when it comes to my own three kids. My two oldest were born in June, and I often remind them that having summer birthdays is the best thing that ever happened to them. My youngest was born in January. When his birthday rolls around each year, when the Christmas decorations are packed away and the winter doldrums settle in again, I think about my mom buying cartons of ice cream and my dad securing loads of sand, hauling summer into a cold basement because their daughter asked for it. And I wonder what kind of mess I’ll be willing to make for my own January baby.