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Making the Big Day Special
"You're making an awful fuss," I told a friend many years back when she arrived with gifts, balloons, and sang a chorus of "Happy Birthday" to my two year old.
"Your birthday belongs to you," she told me. "Christmas, Hanukkah, Thanksgiving, the Fourth of July, everyone celebrates those days. When people celebrate your birthday, they are celebrating your life." I realized she was right, and from that day on, I tried to make the birthdays of the people I love very special.
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I observed the ways friends and family members commemorated their children's birthdays, and added elements of their celebrations to my repertoire. Some ideas I used year-in, year-out; others were added at the appropriate age. But our family always made an "awful fuss" over birthdays. Now, I'm joining in the celebration of my grandchildren's special days. Here are simple ways I have found over the years to add pizzazz to the anniversary of the day a child was born.
Remember that special day of birth with your child. Look at pictures from the day of birth together, and tell your child stories about what happened. For my middle child, I told and retold the story of the first night after his birth every year until he was a teenager: "The nurse, a stout warmhearted woman, brought you to me. She saw how much I wanted to hold you. She was supposed to take you back to the nursery after 20 minutes, but she left you with me for three hours. When she came back, you were snuggled against me, sleeping peacefully. 'You are a good mother,' she told me. She did not know what kind of mother I was. But she could see that we loved each other already."
Dan never tired of that story. I even wrote it down for him as part of a memory note I gave him on his 21st birthday.
Take photos at each birthday celebration. Have a birthday photo album filled only with birthday pictures, and bring it out and add to it each year. Jotting down a few notes from each birthday can help jog your memory. One year I found a huge coffee table on sale somewhere. No one liked the intrusion of the large rectangle in the living room until Dan's third birthday. It was just the right height for the children's folding chairs I had borrowed, and all eight little ones could sit around it. I have photos to go with the story. There will be a few years when the children might be embarrassed over the show, but the album soon becomes a lifetime treasure.
Celebrate growth. We would start the morning of the birthday by standing tall, back against the door frame of Dan's room. The boys shared a room, so each had a side of the door frame as his own. With a magic marker I would record the child's height and write the date next to it. When we moved, I carefully measured and transferred the markings to the boys' new room.
Imagine future birthdays and reenact past ones. What fun the kids had at a birthday party my friend gave for her eight-year-old daughter! All the guests brought dress-up clothes and pretended it was Jenny's 30th birthday, not her eighth. It was a way of saying that the child's birthday would always be important to this group of friends. This activity also works well in reverse: Your child can pretend with dolls that it is her birthday five years ago, or he can stage a play to reenact an earlier celebration.
Read books about birthdays. My son's wife has found several wonderful books to read on birthdays. They give the child a sense of how important the day is for his mom, dad, and siblings. On the Day You Were Born by Debra Frasier and Happy Birthday by Robie Harris are two of her favorites.
Write a birthday book just for the child. Make one every year. A colleague with a creative bent shared this idea with me. She takes a small photo album and places a picture on the left side of the page and writes something on the right. For her son's first birthday, she cut out pictures of animals from National Geographic. Each animal wished him a happy birthday in its own fashion. For example, the bear said, "Ethan, I wish you a beary happy birthday," and the sheep said, "Happy baaaaah-day, Ethan." For Ethan's seventh birthday, his mom took photos of his brother and sister, his favorite cousins, and five of his friends. She put a photo on the left and asked the person in the picture to wish Ethan "Happy Birthday" in some special way. She wrote down each wish and put it on the right side opposite the photo. Ethan now has a library of nine very special birthday books.
Make a "It happened on this day, too," scrapbook. Clip out interesting stories that happen on the day your child was born from newspapers and magazines, and add them to the scrapbook every year. Years later, it will be fun to look back at the unfolding events.
Make it a "It's Your Choice" Day. I always let each son choose the dinner menu on his birthday. He could have anything that he wanted, no matter how outrageous. One year we had spaghetti and chocolate chip cookies--in the same dish. Exempting the birthday child from household chores is another treat.
Encourage others to help make the child's day special. Spread the word, and encourage "random acts of birthday kindness." When my best friend's daughter turned 16, her mom told everyone in our small town a day ahead of time and asked people to wish her "Happy Birthday." Her schoolteachers, the librarian, the gas station owner, friends, and all of the neighbors helped Jenny feel special that day.
My friend was right all those years ago. Celebrating a birthday is celebrating a life. So make a fuss--it's an excellent way to let a child know how much he or she is loved.
Linda Batt, the mother of three grown children, lives in Rensselaer Falls,
New York.
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