"There comes a time when you should stop expecting other people to make a big deal about your birthday. That time is age eleven." (Quote attributed to Dave Barry)

            Not sure I totally agree, here, Dave. Make as much or as little fuss about your birthday as you want, but don’t arbitrate what other people should do. My mother threw a very nice birthday party for me on my fortieth birthday. She threw an even bigger one for her own fiftieth some years before, for which her children made her 50 cupcakes. My oldest brother’s 25^th  birthday and my grandmother’s 75^th  were other landmark birthday parties. The cake in this picture is the one I made for my mother’s 75^th birthday in 2005 when we were sharing a rented beach house  in Florida for a week.  The glorious beach at Seaside was my rather obvious inspiration.  Since I’m one day away from my next birthday, birthdays are somewhat on my mind this week.

Total strangers, okay. I’m not expecting them to take any notice.  I’m not demanding a national holiday, here. But my family and friends are stuck.   I don't expect my family to whisk me off to a splendid Hawaiian vacation or a cruise on the Queen Mary II as a birthday surprise. (This is not the same thing as saying I’d object if they did. I certainly loved my trip to Italy in September 2003, which was a fortieth birthday present from my mother.)  But I want some recognition of the day even if it's just a  happy birthday phone call.

Birthdays were big when I was growing up; it was our day to feel special and loved and be the center of attention.  There were birthday parties, presents, streamers and balloons, games and  birthday cakes made and decorated by my mother. Because of my pleasant associations with birthdays, I don't dread them,  even when I feel amazed to be this old and even when I feel I don’t have a whole lot to show for having been on the planet for forty-odd years. It's looking less and less likely that I'll win the Nobel Prize or write the Great American Novel by the time I'm fifty, for example. Rightly or wrongly, I have a certain sense of entitlement about birthdays. I expect pleasant things to happen, and take steps to create them on my own account if need be.  Nothing and nobody can stop aging and we’re all ultimately terminal on this bus. Birthdays are inevitable with each trip we make around the sun.  So why not make a nice occasion of it rather than fighting it off with dread as we hang each year out to dry? Why  not use it as an excuse to treat ourselves to something we want, even if it’s only an ice cream cone? Its one day out of the year when we can make a point of being nice to ourselves. There will never be a shortage of bad news on Earth, and especially this year, we could all use all the cheering up we can get. I see nothing wrong with wanting a few presents, a birthday cake with candles to blow out, and maybe a nice bouquet to mark the anniversary the day I joined the world. I acknowledge the birthdays of friends and family with a phone call or a card at least, and often a small gift if I know when their birthday is. Even people who insist on minimalist birthdays appreciate it when you remember them and wish them well on their day. I’ll settle for a card, and even an e-card, but I want some form of acknowledgement.  

In all my family’s photo albums, family birthdays are well documented, including the birthday cakes. Michelangelo worked in marble and Da Vinci in oils; buttercream frosting was my mother’s favored artistic medium, and she produced some baked masterpieces. Not for us were the conformist bakery cakes with their gobs of pastel buttercream roses on them.  We even heaped scorn on such shortcuts as bakery cakes. To the point  that  my sister only dared confess  years later to my mother that as a child, she'd actually wanted a bakery cake with frosting roses on it like the ones she’d seen at her friend’s birthday parties.  

My mother's old metal lamb-shaped cake mold did once make a lamb cake for one of my nephew’s early childhood birthdays.  Nathan's birthday is April 7, so our family celebrations of his birthday often coincided with Easter Sunday. But that lamb mold, for all its design limitations, was quite a zoological workhorse for my mother. It formed the basis for the  portraits in cake of our late family cat, Luna, and once for our late Shetland Sheepdog, Pippin. It has even been the base for a lion cake.  Even when she made a cake in a plain, round cake pan, the frosting of that cake elevated it far above the usual frosted cylinder. My brother David had one such cake when he was four or five, which my mother turned into a head and shoulders portrait of a clown with the addition of a cupcake forming the clown’s head.  There’s a picture of my brother Alan admiring his fourth birthday cake that had little toy boats sailing across its blue-frosted surface. My fourth birthday cake was in the form of a giraffe.   One  rectangular sheet cake baked one long ago summer, had a shallow foil pan embedded in it. Before serving that cake, Mom filled the pan with seven-up tinted blue with food coloring, creating a pool-side California dreaming fantasy. Out of cake.  Perhaps the pièce de resistance was the pyramid cake made for my fifteenth birthday, an age in which I had become obsessed with ancient Egypt.  Where a real pyramid would have hieroglyphics carved in them, was the happy birthday message to me. (Alas, I have no pictures of that cake handy.) It even had a maple-sugar “mummy” entombed in a plastic sarcophagus inside it. So I had a lot to live up to when baking and decorating that beach cake for my mom’s birthday.  

This picture was taken at my sixth birthday party, given for me by my father and stepmother in Vienna Austria in late January, 1969. Besides my sister and myself, the guests were the young women among my father’s graduate students who had acted as my babysitters during the month my sister and I spent in Vienna. I was as un-fond of cameras then as I still am now.  The rabbit to my left in this picture is Cabbages, one of the most enduring and memorable birthday presents I ever received. Cabbages is living out his present retirement in a rocking chair on my coffee table as this picture shows:

 His original green felt lederhosen from the first photograph fell apart decades ago, but he has always been extremely well-dressed.  Don’t let his age  and present sobriety fool you; in his youth and my childhood, he  led one of the most adventurous lives a stuffed rabbit ever had, including being repeatedly launched out of upper story windows wearing a home-made, rabbit-sized parachute.  A more recent memorable birthday gift is my antique jade and seed pearl ring. And my comfortable TV watching chair in my living room is another.  Although not every gift I’ve received in my life has had Cabbages’ staying power, I’m still a sucker for little wrapped packages. What’s inside doesn’t have to be big, expensive or fancy—I just like unwrapping things and discovering what they are. Nor do I have any compunction about buying small birthday presents for myself throughout the first week of February.  I’m stimulating the economy, right?

So if you have a birthday coming up;  if your last one was disappointing, or if your loved ones let you down last year, make it up to yourself on your next birthday.  Plan pleasant things to do; give yourself something to look forward to.  Plan ahead and make a date with friends you haven’t seen for a while. Go to a basketball game or some other event you enjoy. Do something you want to do, even if it’s only to go to three movies in one day, or have a picnic in the park. Give yourself an entire weekend to relax and enjoy yourself if you can manage that. Do not let anyone, even Dave Barry, dictate how you celebrate your birthday—you’re the only person whose pleasure matters. If your bliss is a sit down dinner for twenty, and nobody else is likely to throw such a party for you, throw it for yourself  if you can manage it.  I find it easy to get dragged down by someone else’s bad mood, so I suggest avoiding negative people on your birthday. If you  want to be a minimalist, fine. It’s your birthday and your privilege. But even so, try buying a small bunch of fresh flowers to take home—it’s very cheering.  Or pop into the bakery and get yourself a cupcake. Even if you’re broke and out of work, almost anyone can do that much.  If you’re doing okay, but don’t feel like baking, buy cupcakes or a cake for your whole family if no one else is likely to make one for you. Most importantly of all, be kind to yourself.  You are unique, and for one day out of the year, you deserve to be celebrated.