Birthday celebration: How different cultures influenced this tradition
All of you enjoy celebrating your birthdays, don’t you? It’s your special day, complete with gifts, cakes, chocolates, balloons, candles and lots of fun! Irrespective of all the ‘general’ birthday practices, we are sure you have your very own unique birthday celebration ‘tradition’. Similarly, many countries have their own way of celebrating birthdays. In Canada, there is a tradition of smearing the birthday person’s nose with butter, whereas in Mexico, the tradition is to whack a pinata filled with sweat treats. They all sound like a lot of fun, isn’t it? But how did these traditions start or what events influenced them? Keep reading to know how birthday celebrations evolved.
The Egyptians started it all
The birth of birthdays, just like so many other things, can be traced back to the Egyptians. Interestingly, our good old Egyptian friends were not celebrating commoners’ birthdays but Gods’ birthdays! Yes, the tradition of celebrating birthdays began with commemorating someone’s birth as a god. The Egyptians considered that when a Pharaoh or king was crowned, they became a god, and thus their crowning day was celebrated as their birthday!
Similarly, the ancient Greeks believed that on your birthday, God assigned you a guardian angel. Hence, by making wishes on your birthday, you are conveying your wishes to the spirits who carry the message further. Thus, the day was known to be special and spiritual, and people eventually started celebrating it. Remember this the next time you close your eyes and make a wish before blowing out the candles!
The Greeks added the candles
Birthdays are incomplete without a cake, and cakes are incomplete without candles! We all make wishes by blowing out candles. But did you know that there is an intriguing reason behind the origin of this tradition? You are aware that deities were an important part of the Greek culture. To honour their Lunar goddess, Artemis, the Greeks prepared moon shaped cakes. The cakes were adorned with candles to mimic the moon’s glowing radiance and Artemis’s beauty. The smoke from the candles was thought to carry their messages onward to Artemis.
Bonus fact: The Germans took this a step further in the 18th century and started the tradition of having the number of candles equal to your age. The tradition that we follow now has a bit of both Greek and German ideas.
The ‘Happy Birthday’ song
The best way to mark someone’s birthday is by singing the ‘Happy Birthday’ song, right? But did you know that several languages have their own version of this song? You’ll be surprised to know that the song was accidentally composed by kindergarten children in 1893. Intriguing, isn’t it? The credit for the tune goes to a lyricist, musicologist and teacher from Kentucky named Mildred Hill and her sister Patty also a teacher and a composer. They composed a tune for ‘Good Morning to all’ in order to greet her class each day. The kids began replacing ‘Good Morning’ with ‘Happy Birthday’ so they could sing it at parties. Kudos to their creativity! Its popularity grew soon after it was broadcast on the radio as a singing telegram on the Broadway show Bandwagon in 1931. Since then, the song has been nominated by the Guinness Book of World Records as one of America’s top three most sung songs!
Every famous song has been remixed and the ‘Happy Birthday’ song is no exception. In 1924, a songbook was released with this song and a few extra lyrics that quickly overshadowed the original lyrics. The new lyrics to the old favourite became ‘The Birthday Song’ we know today. However, Mildred Hill’s estate still retains ownership of the copyright.