December 18 birthday here.
I always get separate gifts from my close family members and my best friends. Distant family members have been known to combine. Generally, I like this set up but prefer separate gifts. As was mentioned, it wouldn’t happen if my birthday was in July.
I agree that this is a heinous offense and should be punished to the highest degree. Again, July presents wouldn’t be wrapped with candy canes and Santa.
My birthday is Dec. 10 and I’ve never been super bothered by the “combo-present” deal - my parents never did that and my brother never did either.
I’ve always found it a drag because:
It falls right at exam time - This year I have 2 finals on the 9th, an online assignment I have to do on the 10th and a final on the 11th - sooo, no big celebrations.
It’s so close to Christmas that it’s always a pain to choose a day to go out. I’m not particularly bothered, but my friends and family always insist that they need to take me out for a birthday dinner, so then I start listing days that I’m available and no one else every is. Then people get annoyed with me for having a December birthday.
I think if I was ever planning a baby, I would make sure not to have sex in or around March - hold off a while so the poor kid could be born in February or something.
I am early December and while my family have never done the combined presents thing, several friends have over the years. One person I don’t mind doing that as we see each other rarely and she either gives a parcel with two gifts in or gives me one fabulous gift that I wouldn’t expect anyone to buy as a single present. For others, it seems rude.
Um.
Apologies for the lack of sense in the above post. I started a sentence and then went back to add in another bit and now it reads oddly. Oops.
That’s exactly what I do for my little girl. Her fourth birthday is December 26th. We have a little private dinner for her on her actual birthday. Then we have a much larger party for her in June. Her father’s birthday is June 16th so we combine the two parties. My husband likes to really celebrate. We do half cakes, half decorations and even half pints of juice. The only thing we don’t encourage is half presents. 
My brother’s a December 24 kid. We celebrate his birthday as a family on the 24th. He gets presents for both holidays, with the birthday ones wrapped in birthday paper. Then, he gets a party with his friends in January.
As a little kid, it was always hard to be so excited and want so so so badly to be able to open my Christmas presents, then have him get to open some gifts the day before Christmas.
What is this “Christmas” you are speaking of? 
Nov. 30, with a daughter born Dec. 1; so I qualify for this thread even though we really don’t celebrate Christmas here (and Hannukah is really not that much of a “gift” holiday here, either.) So, actually, I still end up getting only one gift… 
I was born on December 1st. We didn’t get much in the way of presents, because my folks were kinda poor, but Mom and Dad did a good job seperating my birthday from Christmas.
Gah! I remember that! Never got to have birthday celebrations with my friends because it was always in the middle of finals! (Mine’s the 10th, too.)
We did have a tradition of putting up the Christmas tree on my birthday and taking it down on my mom’s, but that never bothered me. I don’t remember getting birthday presents wrapped in Xmas paper, but I don’t think it would have bothered me much.
I’m not close now with anyone with a December birthday, but if I ever am again, they can count on two gifts from me. I will always remember the experience I had when I dated a man whose birthday was the week before Christmas.
I bought him a nice, but modest birthday gift (a book I knew he’d like.) A day or two later, since he was going out of town on Christmas, I gave him his Christmas present. It was also modest (a shirt) because I had limited funds.
The Christmas present actually brought tears to his eyes, because he said, no one had ever given him more than one combined gift. He was thirty years old at the time.
Mine is December 6th, and yes, people have tried to pull the old birthday/XMas combo on me. C’mon people, stop being so cheap! They’re 19 days apart, it’s not that close!
I’ve often joked that I have one of the worst birthdays, Jan 23.
I don’t get too many combined presents, but everyone is usually broke by the time my birthday rolls around.
Plus, I lived in Ohio for most of my life. Lousy weather on my birthday many years as well.
Mine is January 25th…exactly a month after Christmas…when all the Christmas credit card bills are rolling in!
When I was a kid I didn’t get many (if any) combo presents. Now that I’m a grown-up, it’s different. I ask for combo presents. I know that the $250 grain mill I want is more than the amount my mom and dad would spend on me for Christmas alone, but less than the total amount they would spend on me for my birthday + Christmas.
Early December here. My parents were pretty good about it but I think joint presents were common. One of the things which made it easier was that the Christmas decorations only went up after my birthday.
Well, see, my husband’s family likes Carnaval. That’s the problem.
I really think that’s the problem.
So my husband (December 15), my mother in law (January 8), and my younger child (January 8) all have this problem. My father in law did too but has since passed. We are champs at it.
Since none of them like combined birthdays/Christmas we don’t do them. Now it must be said that we don’t do very much for adult birthdays in our family, mostly we go out to eat and leave the gift extravaganza to the kids.
The biggest problem is that Youngest hasn’t got any really strong preferences in toys yet so finding something to get him is a challenge. However, my experience with Eldest is that this clears up soon enough.
As a child I got ripped off with the combo gifts. My bday is one week after Xmas, and I would just get the one gift for both and no party. That was rolled into xmas day stuff.
New Year’s eve baby here. (Dec. 31) and my parents always made sure my birthday was separate from Christmas. The tree went down the next day but it didn’t matter.
This is awesome. I’ll have to remember this.
I have a late December birthday and I’ve been ripped off my whole life. As a child people outside the immediate family, if they gave me a gift at all (and I’m not saying they should), gave me a combined xmas-birthday gift. I had one birthday party in my entire childhood, and it was when I was spending my birthday with friends of the family for some reason. They amazed me with how fun they made my birthday.
Dad took pity on me and decreed we would start celebrating my half-birthday instead of my birthday, but Mom was never on board with that, so she stuck to forgetting my real birthday.
Now that I’m an adult I’m supposed to be over this, but the last freakin’ straw was when someone at work with a June birthday got a big freakin’ party at work. For me…a card.
My birthday is Dec. 16th. Up until I turned 9, it wasn’t a big deal. A few folks combined, most didn’t.
For my 9th birthday, I got a little brother. Good timing, mom! I really hated sharing it with him, at first, but now that we’re both “grown-ups”, it’s kinda cool.
My Daughter was born on Dec. 28th, in 1995.
My first Son was born on Dec. 27th, 1997.
I have been fighting with my ex-wife, off and on, since we split. I want her to have a party for each kid. I had even offered to have one party at my place, and she could do one at her place (before I moved 3000 miles away…). She refuses, and they get one party for both of them.
But again, most folks don’t give combined presesents in either family.
I will state that in general I hate it. BUT, yes, if the present is fucking AMAZING, I’ll be OK by it. This has happened twice, in 4 decades+.
What I hate is never any damn B-day parties, or they are “combo” parties. What a rip.