This past week I celebrated my 54th birthday. I was thinking back and wondering how many birthdays I actually remember and decided it was three.
On my 18th birthday I graduated from high school so that is memorable. When I turned 30, I was on my way home from Nashville with my parents and sister. When we woke up that morning my dad was a bit cranky and totally forgot it was my birthday which caused me to cry because not only was I 30 but he forgot. The next one I very clearly remember was my 50th when my amazing daughters arranged a surprise party and invited several women who had been important at different times in my life. I was totally and completed surprised, and it felt like a wonderful episode of "This Is Your Life".
Guess I am not a big birthday person in that I don't make a big deal of it nor do I profess to remembering every one's birthday or recognizing it. It did seem amazing that out of 54 years, I only remembered three birthdays. In doing some research about birthdays, this is what I found.
It was believed that one could be helped by good spirits or pursued by evil spirits on one's birthday. For this reason, people would gather around the birthday person to offer protection from evil spirits. The Greeks believed that everyone had a protective spirit that guarded over his birth and protected him during his life. This spirit, the Greeks believed, "had a mystic relation with the god on whose birthday the individual was born".
So my conclusion after thinking about birthdays for the past few days is this: the main reason we do it is to honor a person and to make them feel like they are cared for and loved. It is a day set aside to simply recognize our specialness as a distinct human being.
Quote for the day: A birthday is just the first day of another 365-day journey around the sun. Enjoy the trip. – By Author Unknown
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