Sarah O'Connor

My sister and I’s birthday is on December 23rd, and while a lot of people feel bad for us for being born so close to Christmas, it’s not something that’s bothered us (and I guess it was kind of our fault, being born premature and all). Our parents were always good about treating our birthday and Christmas as separate days so our birthday always felt like our birthday and Christmas always felt like Christmas.

The only real problem with being born so close to Christmas is that you can never really celebrate it with your friends. And it isn’t their fault of course, we were born literally two days before Christmas and people are busy getting ready for how they’ll celebrate the holidays. When we were little our parents would always schedule our birthday parties in January since nothing (except New Year’s) really happens then. But as my sister and I grew older and “inviting your entire class to a party” wasn’t really a thing anymore, our birthday celebrations just became something we did as a family. Again, this wasn’t a bad thing; it’s just what happens when your birthday is near a major holiday.

But this year at the urging of our friends, my sister and I decided to set up something so that we could celebrate our birthday with friends, we were turning twenty-five after all which I guess is a big deal. Of course our get together would be after our actual birthday to when people were free. We decided on the first Saturday in February and chose to have it at a karaoke bar in our city, since karaoke is one of my sister’s favourite things (me, not so much).

Here’s one thing about being a twin, you have twice as many people to invite to things. This is of course a good thing, it’s always good to have more people to invite to things than less, but I was surprised by how many people said were going to our event. It’s kind of an unspoken rule that of every ten people you invite to something three show up, so I was expecting the same kind of thing to happen. But people said they were coming, and we somehow managed to get a table for nearly thirty people at the karaoke bar so all plans were go!

Which of course made me a bit anxious, because my sister and I had never really hosted anything like this before and I wanted to make sure that we each got a chance to mingle with everyone so no one felt left out, and with a large group of people it made me feel more pressure. And I also worried that even though people said they were coming online that they wouldn’t in person which is always a risk.

But nearly everyone came and it surprised and shocked me and made me feel so incredibly loved I don’d have the words for it. I saw friends I see and talk to almost every day, friends I only see once in a while, and friends I rarely see. My sister and I were able to talk to everyone, eat some good food, and sing some karaoke (that I was voluntold to do). I had such a fun time loved getting to spend my Saturday night with some phenomenal and fun people.

I’m happy that we decided to do an event for our birthday at one of my best friend’s urging and I’m happy it was such a success. It was so nice to see everyone, to have fun, and was so much less stressful than I ever thought.

So here’s to more celebrations (and maybe more karaoke, should I get voluntold to sing again 😉 ).

(Pictures of myself and my sister from our party taken with my Polaroid camera.)