I always hated having a birthday on 2nd January.

My first ever birthday party was in my thirties. My mother was a teacher and my father head master of a choir school which worked up until Christmas Day, so we were always on holiday in the New Year. Probably in Norfolk, in my grandparents’ holiday house. Which had no central heating, dishwasher or any labour-saving aids (or more to the point in those days, staff, which of course we had at home because we lived in a boarding school). So going to Norfolk was pretty grim, frankly. Ice-cold water to wash in and very cold bedrooms, and a great deal of washing up.

And no birthday parties.

I don’t know why my parents didn’t arrange for me to invite my friends round when we got back home again: perhaps by the term term started, they were too busy. Anyway, my mother always told me, even late into my teens, that I had, “Never had a birthday at home.” Nor did I in my twenties, though presumably by the time I was married (to someone who also worked until Christmas Day) there must have been an element of choice involved.

One year my brother gave me a record of Strauss’s waltz music. At my birthday a week later he told me the reverse side could be my birthday present. After I was married my other brother asked me what I’d like for Christmas and I chose riding gloves. They were expensive, for an unwaged smallholder (£8, from memory), so asked if he could give me one for Christmas and the other for my birthday.

When we had children of our own I planned their births for late spring or early summer, every one.

I’m trying to remember when I suddenly realised I could, instead, love having a birthday at Christmas. It was after we moved to Bedford in 2009. It was after Christian came into our lives, and he and Serena must have met in 2011. It was some time after my family gave me my first surprise birthday party, as that was in Parson’s Green which we left just after my birthday in 2005.

So it wasn’t the first time I enjoyed my birthday, which was surely then if not before. It was simply the first time I realised it. When I walked into our drawing room here, fresh from a muddy walk along the river with the dog which Ben and Shaun had insisted on taking me on, and found it full of dear friends in black tie and Christian coming in from the kitchen in his dinner jacket and probably an apron, carrying a roast sucking pug (with an individual Beef Wellington for my cousin Fleur… prompting me, not for the first time, to be tempted to envy her Jewishness).

And I realised that it is glorious, having a birthday in the New Year. With the holly and mistletoe still dressing the house and the lights still twinkling on the tree and the Yule log still in season and all the family at home.

The metaphorical applications barely need elucidating. The reason my mother was so happy all her life was because of the philosophy she lived by. All things work to the good for those that love the Lord Jesus. Look at the challenge from another angle, and rejoice at it.

On the day when everyone else groans back to work bleary eyed and before they are quite ready, I sit in bed with a mug of tea, a coal fire glowing in the grate and my new blog to write.