My son, “B,” turned to me last night as he was getting ready to fall asleep, and asked why we celebrated birthdays? After doing something unusual, like actually researching a few articles online, and hold on—thinking about it for more than a minute, I came up with some really good reasons we celebrate birthdays.
We love thinking we’re younger than someone else. Joe Schmo is getting older, hard of hearing and flatulent. We haven’t gotten there yet, so obviously, we are superior to Joe Schmo.
We hope to be invited to Joe’s party. He may not be a great cook, but he hires great caterers. He also has a nice bar. (Love those little M & M’s he puts in really small trays so they fall all over the place.)
The capitalist system, as we know it, would flail and flounder, were we to stop celebrating birthdays.
Celebrating birthdays allows us to goof off for one-half to one full hour at work.
Calories ingested on birthdays do not count against your diet. It’s true. Your body can recognize birthday brownies from regular holiday brownies and discard them faster.
AAARP has been plotting since the ‘60’s to overthrow the government and replace leadership of both parties with grandparents from Boca Raton. The more oldsters they sign up, the easier it becomes to replace politicians with doppelgangers. Do you really think that was George Bush? (Pick one.)
We hope to freeze time in place for one moment, a brief flash of time, a second so pure that we remember it forever. Rosebud
Governments the world over would just have to conscript soldiers off the street instead of inviting them, quite civilly, to come in to an office where they would sign them up and pack them off to be shot at, at a later date.
Of course, I told my son none of this. I just told him it was because love should always be celebrated. Actually, I didn’t say that either. It just sounded good in my head and nearly brought me to tears.
I said, I don’t really know why we celebrate birthdays, but I’ll find out for you. And I did. One day though, I’ll tell him that on the day he was born, and they raised him up in the air like a Peking Duck, with testes drooping like dice from a car’s rear view mirror, that I fell in love with his birth day. I want to celebrate that birth day until I can’t. At least that one, I understand.