October 2nd, 2025
It's 5 a.m. on the morning of my birthday. While most of the world is still asleep, I'm awake wondering why we humans feel compelled to count the years since we showed up screaming in the delivery room.
When you're young, birthdays are freedom passes. At 16, you get the keys to a car. At 18, the keys to a voting booth. At 21, the keys to a bar, though most of us had already been running practice drills. Every year feels like a fresh badge of honor.
Then the calendar plays a trick. At 30, you would sell your gym shoes to be 20. At 50, you dream of being 30. At 70, you would trade your retirement watch to be 40 again. Birthdays flip from counting up to counting back, which is why we should at least laugh about the absurdity of it all.
Divine Promotions
The first birthdays weren't for regular people. Ancient Egyptians only celebrated pharaohs, and not their actual births. The party started when a pharaoh was crowned, the day he officially became a god. His "birthday" was really a promotion day.
Goddess of the Moon
The Greeks added style to the mix. To honor Artemis, goddess of the moon, they baked round honey cakes and topped them with candles so they would glow like the night sky. It was mystical, spiritual, luminous.
Romans: The First Party Animals
The Romans, never shy about a celebration, turned birthdays into wine-soaked festivals. Men got parties, women did not. Equality, it turns out, was a concept of the future.
Christians and the Birthday Ban
Early Christians banned birthdays as pagan nonsense. But when they realized celebrating Christ's birth could be a beacon for the church, December 25th became official. Slowly, personal birthdays slipped back into respectability.
Why Once a Year?
Why yearly, not monthly or once a decade? Because the ancients measured life in solar cycles. A year felt significant. A monthly birthday would feel like paying rent. Once a year was the Goldilocks zone of celebration.
The Logic of Gifts
Why the presents? The Greeks believed gifts kept evil spirits away. The Romans turned it into a gesture of respect. Over centuries it morphed into a social contract: "I bring you socks, you bring me a tie."
Why We Keep It Up
So why do we persist? Because birthdays remind us we belong. They tell us that even with another wrinkle, someone is glad we are still here (at least it appears that way).
The joke of birthdays is that we spend the first half of life rushing to grow up and the second half wishing we could hire a magician to make us young again.
Beats The Alternative
Birthdays may be proof that time is a prankster. One year you're racing toward adulthood, the next you're trying to sneak back... without anyone noticing. Still, I'd rather be counting birthdays than the alternative. It keeps me in the game, even if the rules and my perspective keeps changing.
