What is your favorite Birthday Cake?

Why Birthdays Should  be yet another day?

Cakes for birthday celebrations is decidedly an atrocious idea and a pernicious practice. The history does not fancy cakes very favorably ever since Marie Antoinette, the imperious  and truculent consort of Louise XVI wanted the starving masses of France to have cakes in place of bread. I wonder why the revolutionaries in France did not ban cakes for ever in France, abhorrent as such association was. The world,I am sure, world have followed suit –  if not fully, at least substantially.

Cakes carry no virtue. They are decidedly harmful for human health and cast a deleterious effect on spirit and morale of those who consume it.

But why cakes? I am opposed to the very idea of celebrating birthdays. It offers no benefit except to feed one’s ego and makes one feel important for no good reason. It is feudal, egotistical and a foolish attempt of imitation without any benefits, tangible or otherwise.

The practice of celebrating one’s birthday in the way they are done now a days, defies my idea of celebrating the most important day of one’s life. They are contrived and a conspiracy to inflict frivolity and inessential on the person and all others who join her. In a time when essentialism seems the most rational response to the challenges that the humankind is facing, celebrating birthdays in the way we do is certainly wasteful, squandering the resources unwisely.

Not long ago, for most people, birthdays were once just another day. Industrialization changed that. In fact, the song “Happy Birthday” is not far beyond its own 100th birthday. The idea that everyone should celebrate their birthday is, weirdly, not very old itself. Not until the 19th century—perhaps around 1860 or 1880—did middle-class Americans commonly do so, and not until the early 20th century were birthday celebrations a tradition nationwide. In many cultures celebrating birthdays, the way it is done in US or Europe or other parts of developed world, is beyond imagination.

And the cake is the ultimate symbol of triumph of commercialism over tradition, of ugly crassness over an humbling commemoration.

The history records only scattered examples of birthday festivities around the globe, where the honorees tended to be either rulers, such as Egyptian pharaohs, or rich and powerful when monarchies began making way to oligarchies. Even in US, a similar pattern followed. Birthdays were for rich people or national heroes. Americans celebrated George Washington’s birthday, for instance, but for everyone else, a birthday—if they even knew the date—was just another day.

To imitate the rulers and rich is a foolish attempt to seek importance and a dubious tribute to the worst form of feudalism.

Christianity certainly predates the ostentatious practice of celebrating birthdays. In the whole of Bible, there are only three references to birthdays.The first account is in Genesis. Egyptian king, the Pharaoh celebrated his birthday by executing his chief baker. In the second account, the New Testament figure Herod the tetrarch, reluctantly ordered the beheading of John the Baptist. During the dancing and merry-making at his birthday party, Herod got carried away and eventually made a promise that he did not want to keep. The third reference is found in the book of Job. The Bible says that Job’s seven sons “went and feasted in their houses, every one his day; and sent and called for their three sisters to eat and to drink with them”. Apparently, during the birthday party of Job’s oldest son, God allowed Satan to kill all 10 of Job’s children through what appears to be a tornado.

All three references to birthday celebrations are tragic and lead to the unnatural demise of disciples dear to God. There is not a single reference that in any way endorses the festivities of birthday in any manner. So, while there may not be any direct prohibition of birthday celebrations, there is no approval as well. And while this practice of not celebrating birthdays may be confined to a particular sect ‘Jehovah’s Witnesses’, the spirit of this belief is universal.

And christianity is not the only religion to regard birthdays in such a light.

A birthday is a time to celebrate birth itself, the joy of life. It is also an occasion to rethink one’s  life Its a time for introspection: What I have accomplished and what I can accomplish? How can I strengthen the thread that connects my outer life and my inner life?

If one believes in rebirth, a birthday can also teach us the concept of rebirth. To recall our birth is to recall a new beginning. Your birthday is a refresher, a chance for regeneration—not just materially, but also spiritually.

Birthdays are a serious matter as has been our birth to be celebrated in more evolved ways. 

Cutting a cake is primitive.