By Kerri Havnen Gordon

If you’re like many people over the age of 30, your birthday goes something like this …

When you wake up in the morning, the thought that it’s your birthday is an instant downer. You take a long, appraising, disapproving look in the mirror. One year older and it shows.

When did those little lines on your face turn into deep crevasses? Farther south, gravity is taking its toll in disturbing ways. You can’t help but be reminded that you are no longer 25 or 35 or 45 or 55 or whatever. Aging stinks, and this yearly milestone brings you one step closer to your own demise. Multiply all this by 10 if your birthday has a zero in it.

Celebrating seems absurd at best and a cruel joke at worst, so before your birthday, you ensure your gloom by telling your family, “No gifts. No party.” Instead, you’d rather mope and forget the whole dismal business, never letting a single colleague or friend be privy to your misery.

When evening comes, there is no hiding, because your family can’t just let the day go by unnoticed, much as you would prefer it to be. So you all gather for meal and merriment. If there is a cake, there is no pretense anymore of having the right number of candles. It’s too much trouble to light that many, and there is the smoke alarm to think about.

So you blow out the one lone candle and forget to make a wish, since it is too late in life for wishes and they never come true anyway. You open the dreaded “Over the Hill” birthday card and brighten slightly when opening your gifts because even a birthday party pooper like you can’t resist a wrapped present.

When you finally climb into bed, it is with relief that the day is over.

On the flip side of the coin are those of you who, if truth be told, never really grew out of the childlike exuberance that birthdays are a good thing. You wake up that day joyful because, hey, it’s your birthday! That you’re alive and well is a very nice bonus.

You’ve never subscribed to the idea that birthdays are about getting older. Instead, you view the milestone as cause for celebration. It’s The Day of You - a day when you have license not to cook or clean or wait on others. If you go out, you get to pick the restaurant, and if you stay in, someone else does the dishes.

All trivial stuff, to be sure, but I like to think that the real reason people love birthdays is because life is precious. Friends and family are precious, too. How can our hearts not skip with joy at an unexpected visit, gift, phone call, card or even the simple “Happy Birthday.”

This is why I am one of those people who adore birthdays. I can’t resist a day set aside for happiness and good wishes. It doesn’t take much effort to gloss right over the whole growing older part. I’ll be 46 in a few months, and because I am already five years older than my parents were when they died, aging doesn’t strike me as such a bad thing. Sure, I have more wrinkles than I did a couple of years ago and fewer than I’ll have a couple of years from now. So what?

Birthdays. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, with a measure of good sense and good luck, you’ll have another one and so will I. Might as well enjoy it.