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The Birthday Man was simply a fact of life I grew up with. My mother always told me about the big ledger where he writes down the birthdays of all the little boys and girls in the world. Then, every night, he flies on the back of an elephant delivering birthday presents before anyone is even awake. Of course when I was six or seven I figured out the Birthday Man was really my father wearing a cardboard fez, but the magic has never entirely gone away. So you can understand how shocked I was when I handed my friend a birthday present wrapped in Birthday Man wrapping paper, only for him to exclaim, “But it’s got Santa Claus on it!” I was, for a moment, speechless. Santa Claus indeed! My friend had the effrontery to suggest that I had wrapped his birthday present in Christmas paper. It took a few seconds, but I realized I had finally come face-to-face with a proponent of the so-called “Santa Claus”.