Birthdays

I celebrated my birthday recently, very quietly and without fanfare. I didn't breathe a word about it to my colleagues or students, but since I have the day listed on Facebook, many of my well-meaning friends greeted me on my birthday. Birthdays signal the inexorable passage of time and mark an added year to our lives, and this, from the vantage point of an aging adult! However, when one is a child, birthdays are looked forward to with eager anticipation as a day of gay abandon, gifts galore, cakes, candles and the works. Children start dreaming about their birthdays well in advance and start the countdown to the big day at least a month ahead of time. They keep wondering about what surprise gifts are in store for them, what clothes they will wear on that day, what kind of party they will have, and which of their friends and classmates to invite to it. While this is the norm, strangely enough, in my case, it wasn't.

As a child, I never had a birthday party or cut a birthday cake with candles for that matter. My parents thought it was a very frivolous thing to do so. As I mentioned in one of my earlier posts, the only things that indicated my birthday were a new set of clothes, and my mother cooking my favorite food. That, and of course, a special mention of thanks to God during the daily family prayer. As for gifts, I received a book, only a book, and nothing but a book! To this day, I don't cut a cake on my birthday. In all my life, only twice have I done so, that too only because someone brought it as a surprise. My husband also had a similar childhood, so he's not into the cake-cutting thing either.

We decided that we'd do things differently for our only child, so it was parties, cakes, candles, guest lists, goody bags, etc., - the usual stuff - but only until he was 10. We explained to him that he was well on his way to becoming a teenager and didn't need a big bash from then on, and surprisingly, he took it well enough. Birthdays are rather muted, played-down affairs at home these days. There are cakes and gifts for the kid, with occasionally a few of his friends coming over for pizza and pop, but none of the hoopla that characterizes other children's birthdays. It's mostly a quiet family dinner, with just the three of us. We donate money for a cause or to a charity of our choice, and that's about it. We'd much rather have it that way, and not sensationalize the big day with wild parties of any kind. After all, as John Glenn once said, "There is still no cure for the common birthday!"