Jeremy Lott, of the popular ezine, SpliceToday, frets about the waning popularity of birthday celebrations. Lott writes:
Birthday haters appear to be winning hearts and minds because America is poorer, more secular, and more tired than it used to be. Fortune, faith, and youthful exuberance fueled much of birthday mania that gripped the country for most of my lifetime. I say that the haters are winning because I would have thought a truce between birthday revelers and haters might look something like this: celebrate the kids’ birthdays with gusto, have a bunch of twentysomething bar hops, and tolerate actual parties on birthdays that end in zeroes and, maybe, fives. In fact, people are struggling to maintain even that level of merriment at present.
Makes you wonder who blew out Jeremy’s candles, doesn’t it?
Birthdays are mysterious. Why, for instance, do I and so many of my close friends have birthdays astrologists tell us are connected to the constellation Libra? Born nine months to the day from New Year’s Eve, I don’t think I need a star chart to answer that. My friends and I come from partying families, especially holiday partying families. Stands to reason we’d come across one another at a party, sooner or later.
Birthday celebrations go back, way back. Believing evil spirits visited us on the anniversary of our births, our just-out-of-the-trees ancestors set torches on fire, stuck them in mud pies, and ordered us to keep the flames alive. You could look it up. Can you measure the birth of “advanced” civilization by finding the moment we began to blow out the torches rather than keep them flaming? Just a thought.
It’s true that the level of celebration depends somewhat on the wealth of the celebrants (duh). But candle wax burns, life waxes and wanes, and birthdays come and go. Party on.
With a special birthday wish today for my sister, Janice.