My husband and I celebrate each other’s birthday, but that’s it, and we don’t much like going out to dinner any more. My most recent birthday was celebrated with him and a couple of friends at a Sunday brunch, which was certainly festive enough for me.
I especially don’t like it when Facebook reminds me of other people’s birthdays. The birthday wishes from such notifications always seem pro forma and meaningless, which is why I removed my birth date from my Facebook profile a number of years ago. I also removed it from here and anywhere else I could think of.
I normally don’t make a big deal out of my birthday but I did turn 50 this year so I treated myself a bit more than usual.
My birthday is on the 1st of the month and the company newsletter with everyone’s birthday and work anniversaries that month comes out that day so I always get a lot of instant messages from co-workers.
Not a big deal in a party/celebration/gift sense. But I’m almost always on the road somewhere on my birthday so I make a point of booking a nice hotel and/or spending the day doing something cool. Last year it was a visit to Sensorio (aka “The Field of Light”) in Paso Robles.
It’s never been that big a deal, partly because it’s in December and thus overshadowed by Christmas, but because I was born on the 9th of December, while my father and brother were both born on the 5th. So there just wasn’t enough spare time, energy or money to make a big deal of our birthdays, so we never got in the habit.
Interestingly my mother was born in February, and as a result the males of the family all made a much bigger deal of her birthday than any of ours.
I don’t insist people make a fuss about it, but I like my loved ones to acknowledge it.
It’s personally a big deal to me, even in middle age, because so many people I have cared about didn’t live to be as old as I am. I want to celebrate every year I’m here.
I don’t like, I hate, when people try to minimize my age, pretending I’m not as old as I am. “Oh, the little lady is 29!” No, I’m not. Don’t be stupid or ridiculous. I am not ashamed of my age.
I did appreciate it when friends threw me an actual party for my 60th birthday. There’s talk about doing it again on my 70th. Once a decade is often enough for that.
I don’t make a big deal of it, but I get 4 phone calls, from my 3 kids and my sister. Three days later I call my sister for her birthday. Also my wife will make my favorite cake. But I don’t want to make a big deal of it.
I also like to mark special numbers. For example, on the 85th, I noted it was a constructible number: there is a ruler and straightedge construction for a regular 85-gon. The next constructible number is 96, but I don’t expect to see that one.
My dad’s birthday was the day after mine. He used to mess with my little 4- and 5-year-old mind by asking me how in the world I could possibly be older than him. I think it was when I was 5 that the light bulb finally went on about that.
Ehhh, Big Deal comes in a lot of flavors. The last positive “Big Deal” birthday for me was 21, though I admit to drinking before that (my step-father bought me a nice bottle of rum to take with me to college and replaced it if I asked, so WITH parental permission).
Otherwise, I’ll take gifts given with joy, but otherwise especially as I hit 40+ it didn’t feel like I had anything I wanted to celebrate. And 50 was noticeable depressing, but still kind of a Big Deal (in a bad way) for me.
My younger brothers and I have May-June-July consecutive birthdays, so we all exchange a degree of texts with some flavor or another of “You’re next old man!”.
Yes and no. The event itself is not at all a big deal to me, but I do appreciate birthday wishes. As I’ve gotten older I’ve come to realize that when someone says “happy birthday”, what they are really saying is that they care about me on some level and that our relationship, whatever it may be, matters to them.
For the most part, birthdays haven’t been a big deal to me since I was a kid. As an adult, my 29th seemed like a milestone because I remembered when my mother turned the same age and what a big deal was made out of her being in her thirties soon. i.e. It was just the first birthday where I truly felt as though I was getting older in a way that wasn’t present when I turned 30 or 40.
I’m approaching 50 and I feel as though it’s going to be another milestone for me. Not because of the number of years, at least not specifically, but because my father died at that age. I can’t help but wonder how many years I have left.
As far as regular birthdays go, we don’t do much more than go out for dinner. Last year I invited my mother and my sister and her family to a birthday party. But that was mainly because I thought it’d be fun to have them over to feed them and spend some time together. I imagine we’ll do something for the big 5-0 next year.
I had a wonderful co-worker who, as her 50th birthday approached, decided she wanted to be taken to lunch every single work day of her birthday month. She asked her friends to treat her, and they did. You might think that she suffered from Main Character Syndrome, but the odd thing is that she was actually nothing of the sort: she tends to treat her friends as the main characters, always pumping them up, giving them random little gifts, treats, and affirmations out of the blue. For this birthday, however, she decided it was going to be about her. She is such a giving person, nobody had a negative reaction to it. And so she went on 20 lunch dates with 20 of her closest friends to 20 different places and had a wonderful month. I actually felt honored that I was one of those she wanted to treat her.
I don’t recall if she made a big deal out of any of her other birthdays. She was good about making big deals out of her friends birthdays, though.
So far all the replies justify me – I mostly don’t care about birthday celebrations at all, but for me it started really early. My dad was a pharm rep when I was roughly five to 15 years old, and he was always being assigned to a new territory. And, of course, the ‘sensible time’ to shift a man/family was in the summer, so as to lessen the disruption of schooling.
My birthday happens to be in August. I cannot recall ever having a SINGLE birthday party. We were always in the middle of packing up the house/unpacking in the new one, everyone running around trying to establish ourselves in a new church/doctors office/grocery store/hairsalon/drycleaners/everything! Beside, I would have zero friends in the new place so who would I party with? I would get a hostess cupcake with a candle stuck in it, along with promises (never fulfilled) that they would celebrate ‘properly’ when stuff got settled. But then came September, and school foofarah. And October, when two of my brothers had birthdays just three days apart. And November meant Thanksgiving stuff, and well, we all know what fills up time/energy/money in December, and by January …. it was so long ago, surely it doesn’t matter any more, right?
(I hope you are all feeling suitably sad for me.)
But then I met my hubby in college, and the subject of Birthday parties came up, and I told him this sad tale. And he promptly threw me the biggest birthday party a pretty broke college student possibly could!
Never mattered much to me even when I was young as I’m one of those poor bastards with a birthday near Christmas. The dreaded (when I was young) combination birthday/Christmas present was very much a thing. By the time I entered college I cared not at all. For a few decades I was this, only with everyone including friends…
I was compulsive (neurotic) enough about it that when I was younger and asked, I’d flat out tell friends that I preferred not to say. It was a known quirk among my little circle.
However I gradually evolved into not caring about not caring and now acknowledge it’s existence to others. Long years of habituation means nobody makes a fuss. Indeed nobody in my immediate family gives much of a shit about their birthdays either - they have never been occasions for family gatherings.
Before I entered my recent retirement mode what I’ve done for the last several years is take off half or all of the week of my birthday from work. Since I had a compressed workweek, a five day weekend was easy to arrange and I mostly just spend that time chilling. My little birthday present to myself.
No. Over the years I have often forgotten that it was coming/happening/just gone. Back in the days of office celebrations of birthdays I would usually book the day off at the start of the year. So I knew when it was then.
I have abhorred my birthday ever since age 13 or so. Even at age 9 or 10, I remember the anxiety I felt. When I turned ten, I told myself, “I will never be a single-digit number again.”
