A mother celebrates her son’s Christmas birthday, in life and in death | Helen Ubiñas

She wasn’t immediately sure what to get her son this year for his Dec. 25 birthday.

An easy-to-please kid, he never did ask for much, or complain about having to share his birthday with Christmas.

He wasn’t due until January, but after doctors discovered the baby wasn’t getting enough nutrients, they induced labor, and on Christmas morning in 1987, Eric Keith Woods Jr. was born weighing 5 pounds and 14 ounces.

A surprise Christmas gift for the whole family, which already included an older sister and would grow three years later with a younger brother.

Eric was always a sweet boy, compassionate — even if it sometimes made him a target for bullies. But his mother, Monique Irvis, a school police officer, never wanted her son to feel cheated or overlooked. So each year she and Eric’s father would hold a separate celebration for his birthday, relishing in his excitement when, as a child, he thought Santa was making a special pit stop just for him. Even today, she can’t help but smile when she looks back at photos of those times.

As he got older, Eric was more than happy with a little extra cash to add to what he made at his high school jobs at Wendy’s and Giant, and then after he graduated, as a security guard at the University of Pennsylvania campus. He’d use the money for a nice outfit or just about anything related to basketball.

He lived for basketball. On Aug. 1, 2007, he was on his way home from playing in a neighborhood game with friends when someone opened fire on a Southwest Philadelphia street and he was hit in the chest.

He died in the hospital. He was 19.

Four months after Irvis buried her son in Fernwood Cemetery, she was back at his gravesite on Christmas Day to wish him a happy birthday, a ritual she’s continued every year since. He would have turned 34 this year.

“I wonder what he would have been like at 21 and 31 … who he would have become.”

The first few years, Irvis, 56, had plenty of company. Family, friends — both his and hers — gathered for hours around his headstone. The one with a photo of a beaming Eric from his 2005 graduation from Bartram High School and a basketball net etched into the stone. But as the years wore on, it’s usually just Irvis and a friend or family member or two at the plot he shares with his great-grandmother.

She understands. They have families to celebrate with, lives that, unlike her son’s, weren’t cruelly cut short. She consoles herself knowing that even if lots of people don’t join her at the cemetery on Christmas, not everyone has moved on.

She can tell when she finds a note or card or some other sign that someone else has been there.

“Not everyone has forgotten.”

It helps take the sting out of the 14 years she’s tirelessly sought answers in her son’s unsolved murder. Nothing she’s done so far has gotten her closer to answers: not the billboards pleading for any information in her son’s murder, not the (mostly unanswered) calls to detectives, not the occasional press attention. Not even the prayers — at least not yet, she tells herself.

But she keeps the faith, renewing it every Christmas with the kind of gravesite celebration that’s become agonizingly commonplace among families of murder victims in Philadelphia, where the number of homicides this year has soared beyond 540.

At cemeteries in and around the city, loved ones decorate graves with ornaments and garland, standing vigil before heading to family gatherings where the years only deepen their sorrow, where they set a place at holiday dinner tables for the dead, and the only Christmas miracle wished for is one they will never get — for their loved ones to still be here.

For many, it’s also a time to reflect on another painful year with no answers, and with less than 50% of homicides solved in Philadelphia, diminished hopes that anyone will ever be held accountable.

Irvis has brought balloons to the cemetery in past years. This year she thought about adding a grave blanket, one of those evergreen arrangements placed on gravesites before the first snowfall. She’d bought one for him one year and liked how it looked.

But then, when Eric was a boy, Irvis and Eric’s father used to take the kids to see the Christmas lights on houses around different neighborhoods.

So, she finally settled on a couple of small trees with twinkling lights that even on a gray and rainy Christmas morning felt like a promise of a brighter day. She thought he’d like it.