Hey all! Got a question from one of my students that I can’t seem to find an answer to… anyone know where/why birthday spankings originated??
Never heard of birthday spankings, but among my friends the tradition has always been birthday punches. One for every year. And one for good luck, though that was really just used as an excuse to punch him again.
Cake and light S&M, what better way to herald a new year on this planet? 
The birthday spanking is an old custom dating back to some unrecorded time. Suffice to say, we’ll never know just when it first came to be, but we know it’s all in fun. Hopefully.
Didn’t it originate in Medaeval times? (only spelled right?)
I seem to recall getting a lesson on that while watching a clever British film … something about Pythons and a grrrrrail?
This question didn’t get resolved the last time we asked it, either. Seems like we can’t talk about spankings without mad flirting interrupting everything. 
sorry guys! I did do a search, and didn’t see anything about birthday spankings at all (side issue: what’s up with that? I DID a search for “spanking” and didn’t come up with the thread? Did I do it wrong??)
Anyways, if anyone has some insight into the origins of this custom, my students would really like to know!
I’ve never heard of birthday spankings, but I remember as a kid getting the bumps on my birthday. Grabbing the birthday kid by the arms and legs, you lift them up and drop them down, striking the ground as hard as possible. Repeat for the number of years the persons been alive. Now that I’m 38, I’m glad we don’t do it anymore.
Also, we’d pinch the person (once) as hard as we could, while saying “And a pinch to grow an inch.”
Why we did this or what its origins are, I have no idea.
I have a professor who did his graduate work at Oxford, a place where traditions linger. He is a medievialest, and as such was invited to the annual “beating of the bounds” of the local parish. This involved the priests of the parish herding a group of young boys to all the old boundry markers of the parish (one was in the middle of a department store) and beating them a few times at each one. The medieval rational for this was to entrench the memory of the locations of each of these bounds into the heads of the youngest members of the comunity. By the 1970s, when my professor was there, the beatings had become rather perfunctory; however, when the purpose of the ritual was still relevant I imagene they were rougher. I have no idea how,exactly, this relates to birthday spankings, but I suspect that something similar may have been involved.
Well, I’m from the Midwest (US) and we sure nuff did get birthday spankings AND a pinch to grow an inch. I don’t know why though. It seems that fear of having the DFS called on you keeps the tradition from being past down to this generation.
[hijack]
I used “spankings” as the keyword, and selected GQ as the forum to search; it returned 4 threads: this one, the original spankings thread, a Philip Morris/KKK thread, and some thread about Price Charles’ kinky habits. Strange bedfellows, non? Anyway, just wanted to answer your question. Hope that helps.
thanks Audrey… next time I’ll try to do a more thorough search… but now I have to ask: Phillip Morris/KKK??? What???
Checked out the Phillip Morris/KKK thread… and looked at my pack of Marlboro lights, and I don’t see it… whew! What a can of worms! And I STILL don’t know what to tell my students about birthday spanking! Oh, the humanity!!!
Well from here: http://www.belizetimes.com/jun25-00/atop3.htm
Don’t know how accurate this is. I’ve never heard of the tradition. I think I’d prefer a cake and prezzies.
Isn’t it related to the cliche of the doctor smacking a newborn to get them to cry/breath?
I’m really expecting to hear something about how children are born evil and they need the demons beat out of them. I remember in child development class we had to study how children were treated in different time periods. This was the attitude at one time. I’m sorry I don’t know the details. (High school was a very long time ago.) I was sure that the birthday spanking would be related to this.
It’s quite an anachronism. I had one when I was on the local Marshall KGUN show in Tucson for my fifth birthday. Imagine today allowing your child to be spanked by a cowboy suited, gun toting (a cap gun, but still un-PC) stranger on live television. Boggles the mind.
When I was in college (Revelle College, part of UC San Diego), the birthday tradition was to carry the celebrant out to the Revelle Plaza Fountain, and toss. As a result,
any documentation of one’s actual birthday was jealously guarded. I did so successfully until my senior year, when I somehow left my driver’s licensce on my dorm room desk, and was nailed. My upcoming birthday was my 21st, which made for an especially wet (in more ways than one) evening.
This was in 1979.