I had a birthday this month. I love my birthday. There are lots and lots of people who don’t like to celebrate their birthdays but I am not one of them. Maybe it’s age related, maybe it’s to do with bad surprise birthday party experiences, maybe it’s the prohibitive costs of celebrating these days, but it seems to me that people are less and less inclined to mark their personal milestones anymore.
What age does it become ‘not okay’ (or not socially acceptable) to celebrate your birthday? As a kid, every year a birthday brings with it a new theme, play centre or fast food restaurant. A first born child’s first birthday is not only a milestone for the baby, but also for the parents who made it though one whole year without killing their bundle of joy or each other. A fifth birthday and they are off to school, a tenth to acknowledge double figures, a thirteenth for becoming a teenager. Sweet sixteens are a rite of passage, eighteen is significant and twenty one is the end of the line for parental paid parties. After this birthdays seem to all roll into one, year after year, just getting older and older.
My birthday this year did not fall into any of the ‘special’ birthday categories but that doesn’t mean much to me. I gathered my friends at a local bar and spent a Sunday afternoon enjoying the laughter and fun that is deserved of one on her birthday. I didn’t go on an all nighter and encourage my friends to spend $200 on alcohol, door fees and taxi’s, or choose a restaurant that had a minimum spend of $50 a head (drinks not included). I just wanted to spend the afternoon with my mates celebrating the fact that I made it to the second half of my twenties unscathed.
I don’t remember my first birthday, or my second, but I have seen the photos. Any kid with chocolate cake on their face had a good day. I started kindergarten on my fourth birthday – Mum made cupcakes for the whole group and didn’t that make me Queen of the kinder. I’m sure there was something similar for my fifth. That’s the benefit of having a birthday at the start of the year. When I was twelve I had a joint party with my younger brother – a disco where my Dad put black plastic on the windows and put coloured globes in the light fittings. We played the Grease soundtrack and boogied. There were a few years where I took a friend to dinner at Pizza Hut with my family for my birthday, a few years after that where we went to Smorgy’s – my family always liked value for money when eating out (although I can’t remember how many times my brother has thrown up after All You Can Eat nights). My sweet sixteen was a sleepover with six or seven girls where we ate junk food and watched videos (yes, videos, I am old).
By the time I was eighteen there was a barbeque at home, a gathering of friends and relatives and the nerves that come with going for your licence. My twenty first was one of the best nights of my life and I shared it with one hundred and ten of my nearest and dearest. We hired a hall and put up streamers, Mum cooked hundreds of mini quiches and party pies and I made mix CDs. Dad organised the drinks and my brother worked the bar. It was brilliant. It might have been easier to hire a venue and have staff waiting on us hand and foot, to have a DJ pick the next song and iron out technical difficulties, to have a lighting scheme and someone to fill up the toilet paper when it ran out but I wouldn’t switch my twenty first for anyone’s party I have even been to. It was perfect – and compared to the hosted affair – cheap.
As more and more of my friends have children, I see the cost of the kids parties go up and up. No longer is it acceptable to have a few kids playing ‘Pin the tail on the donkey’ and ‘Twister’ while eating frankfurt sausages and fairy bread. Kids play centres charge a small fortune; even McDonalds is no longer the cost effective alternative. Nowadays, it’s not just first and fifth birthdays that warrant a party, but every birthday, every year, and then some. Invitations and serviettes are themed; there are piñatas, extravagant gift bags, gourmet food and games with expensive prizes. You can’t just invite the boy next door and the girl you sit next in prep: it’s social suicide if you don’t invite most of the class and when you start attending 25 birthday parties a year at minimum $30 a pop on gifts, that’s $750 just on presents that probably will only last a month (be it from disinterest or breakages).
So what to do? You want to give your child the party everyone else’s kid is having without having to spend their college fund. You may think that an 8 year old throwing a tantrum because he didn’t get his perfect party will leave him scarred for life, but as someone looking back on over twenty years worth of birthdays – it doesn’t matter where the party is, or if the cake was chocolate or vanilla. What matters are the people who are there and the fact that there is cake at all. A picture says 1000 words and the pictures of my childhood parties are a thousand or more memories of fun, laughter and love. I still remember the CD my best friend gave me for my seventeenth birthday in the car on the way to dinner (the Superjesus), the heart shaped cake Mum baked for my eleventh birthday (pink icing) and the fairy princess dress I wore on my sixth (blue, lot’s of taffeta and rather itchy if I am honest).
Fire up the barbeque, get out the sprinkles and bread and pop some AC cola in the fridge. Pick up some balloons and streamers and get back to what having a party is all about – getting people together to celebrate someone’s special day. Make 1000 memories and photograph them so when you are older you will remember the fun you had. Eat cake. Lots of cake. Make it from scratch – it’s yummier and cheaper than store bought. Scoff lollies until you feel sick. Play silly games like pass the parcel and musical chairs. But most importantly, put on your prettiest, most outrageous dress or collared shirt and Sunday pants and ensure you spill red lemonade on them.
Happy birthday to all the Aquarians out there and to everyone else who chooses to celebrate their birthday the way it was meant to be done.
