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Everybody loves a birthday party - party hats, cake and candles! The origins of many birthday customs, however, remain a mystery. It is possible that Egyptians were the first to hold birthday parties, but they were only held in honour of their rulers. Parades and circuses were part of the celebrations. Similarly Romans had parades and chariot races to commemorate the birthdays of Gods. The Greeks also recognised birthdays and the origins of birthday cakes and candles may lie with them. They made round honey cakes which were lit with tapers and placed at the altar of Artemis.
In many pagan cultures, people feared evil spirits. Times of change in a person’s life (e.g. anniversaries) made them vulnerable to danger. Therefore parties were held to keep the evil away and to protect the vulnerable person, especially at the anniversary of their birth. Again, many of these societies (including the Greeks and Romans) believed that people had good spirits watching over them. Parties that honoured these spirits would help to protect the person. So enmeshed with pagan beliefs were birthday celebrations that the early Christian church rejected birthday celebrations as evil. The only records that exist of early birthday celebrations are of parties for royalty or other important personages. This may mean that commoners did not have birthday celebrations (or it may mean that they were too insignificant for records to be kept). It is likely that the custom of wearing paper crowns has stemmed from the precedence of royal parties. More recently, about 200 years ago, cakes made from sweetened bead dough and coated with sugar were made for birthdays in Germany. Trinkets, such as coins, buttons or rings were baked into the cake. If a guest received a coin in his/her slice of cake, he/she would come into money in the following year while the ring meant marriage. What about the song we all sing at birthday parties? “Happy Birthday to You” was written by two sisters, Mildred Hill, a kindergarten teacher and authority on Negro spirituals, and Patty Smith Hill, school principal and later professor emeritus of education at Columbia University. Mildred Hill had composed the melody in 1859 but it was not until 1893 that Patty added lyrics. Originally the words were “Good Morning to All” and it was used as a classroom greeting. The sisters published the song in a book titled “Song Stories of the Kindergarten”. Go To Page: 1 2
The copyright of the article Birthday Traditions in Modern Customs is owned by . Permission to republish Birthday Traditions in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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