Story of the Day 3/ 1/ 2013

Friday evening, we celebrated my husband's birthday.
I had bought a very chocolatey cake for him, and we had his cards and presents ready.
Since it was Shabbat, the presents were wrapped leaving an end open, or just stuffed into a gift bag.
We did this because on our Sabbath, we do not tear - including tearing wrapping paper to open gifts.
The package our son sent from New York had been carefully opened in advance , as well, by my husband, before the start of our Sabbath.

I should explain that Friday was not really my husband's birthday, but it was the most convenient day for him.

I know this, because I asked.

About a week before his actual calendar birthday, I asked, "What day would you like your birthday to be, this year?"
It ,may not be the most sentimental way to celebrate the date of his birth, but it is pragmatic, and in our house pragmatic always wins.
Always.

Thats is why, a month before his birthday, I carefully wrapped the present I had gotten for him and left it with our son, Aaron.
I left the card with him, as well.

Too many years, I have bought him or made him a card and a present; and then, at the last moment, had no idea at all what I had done with them.

One year, after finding the Father's Day card I had purchased for him enough years before that I no longer remembered what it said, I mailed it off to his office, in January, because I figured that if I stuck it aside to give him , on the upcoming Father's Day, he would certainly never get it.

On very rare occasions, cards and gifts turn up within the year.
Sometimes, they turn up during some sort of excavation ( translation: housecleaning effort) several years later , and they are so old that I have no idea what their buy-by date was.
This is probably why I stopped buying him gifts of chocolate.
That and the fact that I usually ended up eating the bulk of the chocolate.