Happy Birthday Month!
Yes, I’m tooting my own horn from atop the highest dark-chocolate layer cake! We have to learn to celebrate ourselves just as much as we celebrate others.
My 1970s birthday memories:
A Duncan Hines cake mix creation with thin swaths of canned frosting adorned the once-a-year delicacy. The piece de resistance was a collection of jaw-breaking-hard sugar numbers and letters. When I say hard, I mean hard enough that if they were loaded into a rapid fire weapon the casualty count would be high.
These nasty-tasting confections had a second function. Both the Tooth Fairy and the Dentist stood in dark alleys handing them out to increase their customer base. Just kidding. The dentist handed out awful-tasting red tablets to prove you didn’t know how to brush your teeth.
Only the birthday kid and maybe someone else who won the sugar lottery got to eat them.
There were no bottled waters, no fancy bubbly drinks. No, we were treated to the colored sugar and water drink known as Kool Aid. For the fancy upscale homes, maybe Hawaiian Punch.
Gifts weren’t extravagant presentations of copious amounts of tissue paper and colorful bags costing more than the actual gift itself. A simple square box wrapped in one of two styles of kid wrapping paper (if the gift-giver were a REAL fancy pants) or, for the rest of us, the Sunday comics sufficed.
Now it was time for games. Talk—the game where kids sat in a circle and whispered a sentence to the person to their right until a jumble of unrelated words reached the ear of the birthday child.
And if that wasn’t fun enough, the perennial favorite, Musical Chairs. The game that taught us all the art of shoving other kids off chairs.
By this time, parents crossed their fingers that the weather was nice enough to shoo the mini outside to play. By “nice enough” I mean the snow didn’t reach above the tallest child’s head.
Happy Birthday to all October Birthday friends, and happy reading!