Take a honking big parade, add a feast of corn on the cob and barbeque, top it off with fireworks and what have you got? The Fourth of July, of course. It’s the biggest birthday party in town. Everybody loves a good birthday party.
Ok, well, not everybody.
In actual fact, there is nothing so fraught with drama and trauma than a kid’s birthday party. “You’re not my friend anymore. You can’t come to my birthday party.” It doesn’t matter that the birthday isn’t for another five more months — the rejection still hurts. Conversely, “If you be nice to me, I’ll let you come to my birthday party,” works almost as well as “Santa’s watching” to ensure fair play. Then the birthday party rolls around, and mom says you have to invite the whole class. Your leverage is gone. But it really doesn’t matter, because on the big day, no one shows up. Trauma and drama — a kid’s birthday party takes the cake.
Sometimes the birthday party invitation specifies a sleepover. Who are they kidding? Get a group of kids together for the entire night, fill them up on pizza, cake and ice cream and then expect them to go to sleep at 10 p.m.? I don’t think so. Honest parents invite their child’s friends to an overnighter, realizing that sleep has nothing to do with it. When the party’s over early the next morning and the cranky kids go home to sleep it off, those parents go out of town on an extended vacation to regain their sanity.
Birthdays come with their own set of traditions, like the parades and fireworks that accompany the Fourth of July. One such tradition is the giving of gifts, carefully concealed in wrapping paper. Wrapping paper comes in dozens of patterns and designs specific to the occasion of the gift. Woe unto you if you wrap a birthday present in Christmas paper, or so the marketers would have us believe. True fact—the kid does not care. The sole purpose of wrapping paper is to create a barrier between the kid and his gift. Parents may tout the benefits of delayed gratification, but kids know that wrapping paper is made to be torn off and thrown into the garbage. What difference does it make if it’s decorated with snowmen or birthday cakes when it’s destined for the recycling bin? A brown paper bag or a covering of the Sunday comics serves just as well.
Here’s a fun tradition: the birthday spankings. Parents who would never dream of disciplining their children by spanking them think nothing of administering a spank for every year of the child’s age. Poor kid—it’s not her fault that another year passed by. Why should she get spanked for it? Then there’s “a pinch to grow an inch.” As an adult, I try to avoid this twisted tradition. My pants are tight enough as it is.
The most controversial birthday tradition is, of course, blowing out the candles. We talk ourselves blue in the face trying to teach kids to cover their sneezes. “Use your chicken wings,” we say, as if sneezing into the elbow to keep one’s hands germ-free compensates for lofting the snotty sneeze mist into the ether. Then on their birthdays we encourage kids to blow all over the cake, only to cut it up and serve it to their guests. Do you normally devour a plateful of food that your host has just blown onto at short range? I’m sure I don’t. Sometimes the inexperienced kid takes two or three tries to get all the candles to go out. Sometimes the force of blowing out the candles splatters frosting all across the table. Sometimes sadistic parents load the cake up with those trick candles that relight after they’ve been extinguished, and the kid blows again and again and again, trying to get them all to go out. No thanks, I’m not hungry anymore.
The best birthday tradition of all is the singing of “Happy Birthday.” The joy of hearing your own name in a song is only surpassed by the realization that every time you sing it you’re getting away with copyright infringement, just like you’re getting away with shooting off those monster fireworks on the night of the Fourth of July. Happy birthday! Happy Fourth!
• Peggy McKee Barnhill is a wife, mother and aspiring author who lives in Juneau. She likes to look at the bright side of life.
