A Birthday On Christmas Eve

Could you imagine having your birthday on the 24th or 25th? My relative has it in the first week of December but that’s not necessarily the same thing. I think I’m starting to miss winter already. It’s too hot and it’s not even summer yet.

In this dream, I’m back in high school again. What a surprise. I still can’t move on. I’m still in marching band in this dream but something weird is going on. I don’t recognize any of the bandmates. I think the ginger kid looks similar to a Freshman I had in my section when I was a senior but still doesn’t ring a bell. They are playing outside during the middle of the day at my high schoo. That’s not unusual because sometimes the band likes to play too close to the classrooms for some reason. It doesn’t appear to be blistering hot since everyone is wearing some kind of light jacket or sweater but it’s not cold either. Let’s be real here. It never gets comfortable cold in my area. My memory is really fuzzy right now so I can’t recall what they are playing but a rendition of “Happy Birthday” is one that I instantly recognize. Why are they playing that song? Is it for the band director?

No. They were playing it for me. Right as the song comes to a close, they look towards me and shout “Happy Birthday! Wooo!” Huh? But my birthday is not in the winter season. Far from it. As a matter of fact, my birthday does not align on any day when I am in school. I look at a calendar that’s sitting on a table next to some plates with cakes and desserts and December 24th is circled in a red sharpie mark followed by my name. There was also another table with presents but I’d had to assume they weren’t just for me since this seems to be a case of two parties, one where the marching band was celebrating Christmas Eve and it just so happens my birthday aligns on the same day.

That was pretty much it for my dream. It felt longer than it actually was but something more baffling to think about is the fact that I had to go school and band practice in this dream on Christmas Eve? You know, I don’t think it surprises me one bit. I’m going off on a mini rant here but back in my school days, they would rarely let it off for vacations. Whenever we’d get the Christmas holidays off, it was always the week before instead at the beginning of December like in Uni. And then we’re all back in January. The only time we were ever allowed (assuming you didn’t flunk or in my case took extra college credit classes and was forced to participate in marching band on top of having to do summer reading assignments for books I wouldn’t even touch with a pole) was in summer. Oh and there’s spring break and two days off in Thanksgiving week too but nobody cares about that.

There was this one time where there was a major hurricane heading towards my area and rather than letting us prepare for the storm, the regional school higher ups insisted that we HAD to go to school because the storm was coming in at night and that wasn’t an excuse to skip school. These mother fuckers. Why do parents let them get away with this?