Not a party, but my mom ran an in-home daycare. When we fell sick with chicken pox, obviously her daycare kids had already been exposed. She told the parents they could find alternate care or just bring the kids, let them get chicken pox and she’d care for them. I’m certain the working parents we really grateful as there was no FMLA back in the 70’s.
That is how my son contracted it in 1990. The babysitter’s kids got it and she gave me the same phone call. Since he was already exposed, I kept taking him. He did contract chicken pox , I stayed home with him until his fever went away and then he went right back to play with the other blistered kids. Actually was pretty convenient.
Why pissed? What are the benefits to getting it?
IIRC, he didn’t want them vaccinated because the vaccine was still very new - this was in 2000 or 2001, and he didn’t trust that all its potential side effects had been seen yet. Since chicken pox isn’t really that big a deal for healthy kids, he didn’t want his to be guinea pigs. Plus he was Russian and had a general distrust of doctors/medicine. Which may have something to do with his death last year.
At the time BTW, our own pediatrician was recommending NOT giving the vaccine to otherwise healthy young children for similar reasons - vaccine was too new, and there’s little danger to contracting the disease. MA has since changed the law that you can’t attend public school without either having had the disease or the vaccine, so the pediatrician has since changed their position as well. All my kids wound up catching it before the age of 4 anyway.
I don’t remember which one of us got it first, but my mom made sure that all three of us kids got it before it was all over with. None of the neighbor kids got in on the fun though.
I am a child of the 60’s and 70’s, and I never got chicken pox, mumps, measles, or german measles. I still have my tonsils.
I remember in 5th grade that (nearly?) every kid in my class got chicken pox. Except me. I was in a small school and I was put in another classroom (and different grade).
My layperson’s understanding is that we are 100% certain that the vaccine won’t leave people susceptible to shingles, because shingles results from established, lurking varicella zoster virus.
Because vaccinated individuals have antibodies which fight the virus, it is never going to have the opportunity to get comfortably established and set up housekeeping down in their nerves. Even for the tiny minority that get a very mild case of the disease from the attenuated version of the virus, there is much less chance of it hanging out asymptomatically, because it gets beat down much quicker than the full strength virus.
Even without relying on inference, the vaccine has actually been in public use for almost 25 years, and of course there wouldbe a period of testing before that.
I was a teenager when the vaccine came out. I was going to get it in a few months, when, the day of my 16th birthday* party, I go downstairs and tell my mom I thought I had chicken pox. Then my sister got it - and she was 18 or 19.
I’m sure we both still have scares from picking at it.
- I think it was 16. It was close to that.
Urgh. I’ve never heard of this. I wouldn’t wish chicken pox on anybody. 
We did this in college with gonorrhea. Not sure what we were thinking.
In the early 80s my brother’s class accidentally had a chicken pox party. He caught it from somewhere else, but had such a mild case my mom thought it was bug bites – so she didn’t keep him home from school. When I and most of his class came down with it at roughly the same time (and I had it bad!) the lightbulb went on.
I caught it from my babysitter’s kid at age 2. I remember absolutely nothing about it. I don’t think I was deliberately exposed but I don’t think my parents made any special effort to keep me away from the kid, either.
That was 1989, so a few years before the vaccine came out. I feel like my friends and I were the last cohort where almost all of us got the actual chicken pox vs. the vaccine. Most people younger than me, even just by a couple of years, seem to have gotten the shot.
Oh yeah. I was completely blind in one eye and losing vision in the other just in time for Christmas Eve; it wouldn’t have been so bad except I was misdiagnosed with pink eye, delaying proper treatment. When I finally got a doctor who knew what he was doing, he panicked pretty badly; he later told me that I was likely to have been permanently blinded within a few hours had I not gotten treatment.
Still not absolutely sure that it was shingles; I had had a painful rash a few days beforehand, but not on the face (rather, lower abdomen), and it wasn’t symmetric as the doctors asked. In addition, shingles seems to actually attack the nerves in the eye, while my issue was iritis with a side order of sudden-onset glaucoma. I went through about six months of tests to find some underlying immune disorder and none was found, so the doctors eventually shrugged their shoulders and fell back on shingles as the most likely explanation.
Stress can cause an outbreak? Hmm… mine occurred on the night before my finals that I needed to graduate with both my degrees, during the height of Christmas sales chaos at my retail job, during a painful and extended break-up with my fiancee, and a week of presentations on my math capstone project which had taken me two years to do. I was pretty stressed.
One fun aside: one of the finals was picture identification in a mythology course. We were shown projected pictures of various ancient artworks and asked to identify the gods/stories pictured. And there I was, blind in one eye and losing vision in the other. 
Luckily, the professor took pity on me, and I got to take extra time to do it, seated at the laptop she used, with my face against the screen. Scored an A+!
Damn, you got amazingly lucky both with the Doctor and the Professor!
Being blind is a particular horror of mine - I had a close call with an industrial accident that tossed a facefull of alloy b bronze splinters at me [I still end up picking out the occasional splinter as it works its way out, and the accident happened in '78] I am very visual-driven. I am the type that reads everywhere, I would read in my sleep if I could keep my eyes open. Audio books just don’t cut it for me.
I managed to avoid the chicken pox until I was 14. A lady I babysat for called while I was sick and asked if I could watch her daughter. I declined, saying I had the chicken pox, and the lady said she didn’t mind because she wanted her daughter to get it early. “I don’t want her to get it as a teenager like you,” she said. Thanks lady… I still declined, because when I got the pox I got it bad, and I felt like crap for weeks.
I got chicken pox when I was 5. I don’t know how I got them or from whom. It wasn’t a pox party though. I wasn’t deliberately exposed to anyone at school (I got it over Christmas break - soon as it was gone, I fractured my skull). Both my sisters caught it from me though. I had a very mild case. They both had it pretty badly. I have no scars, they have lots. My poor mom. One mild case followed by two severe cases and a fractured skull. I’m amazed she didn’t run for the hills. I ended up being out of school for about a month - none of it for the chicken pox.
My boyfriend hasn’t had it and he’s 37. He’s never had the vaccine either. His dad had shingles over the summer and my boyfriend was exposed. He managed to not catch chicken pox from it though (apparently you can catch chicken pox from shingles if you’re not immune, but you can’t catch shingles from shingles). His sister had it in her 20’s and it was extremely bad. His brother still hasn’t had it either. So, apparently no pox parties at their house either.
I’m a parent who deliberately exposed my kids to kids who had chicken pox when they were in elementary school. They did not break out. A few weeks later, I had them vaccinated.
My reasoning was
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I had seen a particularly bad case of adult onset c-pox (the woman could barely walk) and knew that the disease was much milder when contracted as a child.
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C pox is often a severe economic hit for working parents since it can drag on for weeks. At the time the disease was in my children’s elementary school, it was convenient for me to miss work if they got ill since a long holiday was coming up.
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I understood that natural acquisition of the disease conferred life-long immunity, but it is not clear if the vaccine does this as well.
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I work in the medical field with pregnant women. While I had a mild case of c pox as a child, I had some fear about carrying the virus to work and infecting patients.
So, it seemed reasonable to me to allow them to get ill at that time. They got a healthy exposure to the disease (but never showed symptoms), followed by the vaccine about a month later, so I think it’s probably pretty safe to assume they are immune now.
I think I made the best decision for us although I could understand it others don’t agree and would choose differently.
I didn’t get chicken pox until I was 19, and I got a reasonably mild case–probably 20 blisters total, none below the waist. I have a couple of scars on my face because I thought the first couple blisters were zits and tried to pop them. Then they started itching. Oops.
My doctor theorized that since I had oral herpes ever since I was 4, it conferred some partial cross-immunity.
I’ve never had chicken pox, nor have I been vaccinated, to my knowledge. I have a 4 year old and a under-2 year old who get all their shots regularly. Should I get the vaccine?
The 4-year old is in a daycare where they are pretty hardcore about vaccinations.
It wasn’t quite a “party”, but my little brother caught Chicken Pox when he was 4. I would have been 9. This was about 20 years ago.
At the time, we spent a lot of time at grandma’s house. She babysat a lot of us grandchildren. Despite being sick, my parents dropped my brother off just as normal.
Nearly all of my aunts and uncles showed up with cousins in tow - "Oh, is (GameHat’s little brother) sick?"worried
Grandma: “Just chicken pox”
Nearly all aunts and uncles: “Oh, good! Then [cousin] can get it over young!”
All left the kids with grandma, happily. I got chicken pox, so did a bunch of my cousins. Other than a few scars (one smack in the middle of my forehead, dang it) it was probably ok for us kids.
Grandpa though, got a wicked case of shingles a month or two later. Not sure if it was directly related to this house of plague, but shingles was no fun for him.