Blog 3181 – 07.18.2024

Our Personal, Yet Shared, Holiday

Birthday days should be and are special. I had forgotten, but yesterday was our new daughter Lauren, my son’s wife’s birthday, just one day after our first daughter Emily’s birthday. My wife and I drove by to drop off a birthday card and some multicolored roses for Lauren. The smile on her face was the response that birthday greetings, cards, and gifts are intended to invoke and said without words, “Thank you for remembering me on my birthday.”

Sadly so many people say, “I no longer celebrate birthdays. One of the most strict Christian cults, The Jehovah Witnesses, teaches that celebrating even your own birthday is a sin. I have no use for “guilt religions” that assume that anything pleasurable or fun must be a sin. People stop celebrating birthdays for many reason from just not wanting to admit they are getting older to just not thinking they are worthy of the expense, the attention, or the bother.

But I believe the saddest and perhaps biggest reason that people stop celebrating their birthday is disappointment or the fear of reliving yet another unremembered birthday. So to spare ourselves another of those “Am I that easy to forget” moments we choose to avoid birthdays altogether and to forget our most important personal, yet shared, holiday.

In his famous book How To Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie devotes a whole chapter to remembering people’s birthdays. It may seem like a small thing, but remember today’s title if you remember nothing else from this blog, that birthdays are our own personal, yet shared, holiday. If you want people to remember you, remember their birthday and for your own sake and theirs, let them remember yours.

For all but the first couple of years of her brief thirty two year life, when she was finding still her voice, my daughter Emily would sing happy birthday to me on my birthday. Most of those songs were in phone calls, but I so looked to hearing my little girl sing her song. I still hear her singing in my heart. Below is a link so you can too.

When I was younger people would say when they thought anyone else was expecting special treatment, “What do you think it is, your birthday?”

We all, no matter our protests, enjoy a little special treatment on our birthday and every day really., after all to paraphrase what drinkers used to say about it being passed the drinking hour somewhere, it is always somebody’s birthday.

“Happy Birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday, Special Someone, happy birthday to you.”

Your friend and fellow traveler,

David White

True performed by Dancing with Spock – Original song – LIVE at MelonHead + Friends

True performed by Dancing with Spock – Original song – LIVE at MelonHead + Friends