One of my friends is a teacher who is spending the Christmas season in China this year. She sent an email to a group of us, telling us a little about what it’s like to be in a country that isn’t overrun with Christmas hype. This is my response to her.

For some reason, I really, really like this letter. Thanks for sending these out to us.

You probably don’t know this: my birthday is on Christmas! So was my grandpa’s – I was born on his 75th birthday. Want to know how old I am? He was born in 1889 – do the math. ☺

Anyway, most Americans, when they find out my birthday is on Christmas, assume (or guess) that I must have hated it, especially when I was growing up. Their reasons are all about ego-centric concerns: did people give me one present instead of two, did Christmas overshadow my birthday so that it was like I didn’t really have a birthday, etc. And they all know someone whose birthday is close to, or on, Christmas, and who hated it.

Americans, right? I think that the well-intended questions and assumptions I hear say a lot about our national culture – and the hearts it tends to produce. From this perspective, I bet I’d enjoy Christmas time in China.

Meanwhile, back in the USA, here’s my take on it: Christmas is the Best. Birthday. Ever.

I never had to go to school on my birthday. Because of the kind of work I do, combined with a little luck, I’ve never even had to work on my birthday. When I was young, I saw my whole (extended) family on my birthday ever year, and we had one of the best meals of the year (yes, complete with birthday cake). In terms of presents, nobody in my extended family could avoid seeing me on my birthday, right? Plus it was Grandpa’s birthday too.

But the main thing that made it cool?

It was Christmas. Duh.

Because of that obvious fact, the mystery of my own incarnation has always been explicitly entangled with the mystery of Jesus’ incarnation. The importance of God deliberately choosing to make us finite is something I’ve only come to deeply appreciate in the last decade or so, but it’s something God put right there in front of me when He choose my birthday. And the Western world seems intent on overloading every once of our finite capacity with ads telling us to Buy. More. Stuff.

I don’t mind when people assume that I don’t like having a Christmas-time birthday. After all, they’ve usually met somebody who doesn’t like it. Plus, our culture has drilled into their heads that birthdays and Christmas are both largely about getting presents. Give us more, more, more! What a shame, especially when one of the lessons of Christmas is that it’s good to give, even to give up an infinite nature and trade it for a human body, in order to serve others. We must become less by serving others, so that they can become more.

To me, that’s what a Christmas birthday is all about. And it’s definitely related to what you have chosen to do to help people in China. Thanks for letting His passion shape yours, and for living out the message of the Best. Birthday. Ever.