Current Trends in Birthday Celebrations

Hello readers! 😊 The topic may sound odd, but this is actually something serious to talk about. Birthday celebrations are fun and we all keep waiting for our birthday for the whole year. Some people are literally waiting for it like a ‘Werewolf waiting for the full Moon.’ The birthday celebration has gone through many serious changes in the last couple of years. This article is all about these changes. Here I’ll be discussing how the trend has changed and what things are possibly responsible for these changes. But, firstly I’ll be telling you, why do we celebrate birthdays?

 The idea of celebrating the date of your birth is a pagan tradition. Pagan is basically a nature worshiping religion. The ancient Greeks believed that each person had a spirit that attended his or her birth, and kept watch. That spirit “had a mystic relation with the God on whose birthday the individual was born,” says the book The Lore of Birthdays. This is how the idea of celebrating birthday started. But as the time passed people stopped believing in this stuff and started to celebrate it just as a part of amusement. I am a 1997 born person. I tried to figure out the differences between the birthday celebrations I had earlier and  the one I have now.

The fact which I appreciate the most is that the excitement of birthday celebrations had never been downhill. The excitement which people used to have earlier, still exists. When I was a kid the birthdays used to be celebrated very differently than they are celebrated now. The main difference between then and now is the fact that, very few are applied a 'Tika' on their forehead by the elderly person from the house. For me birthday is incomplete without the 'Tika' applied by my mother. During schooling I noticed, if a person walks into the class with a 'Tika' on his/her forehead everyone ran towards him/her to wish. It was very obvious he/she had a birthday. Now a days you hardly see anyone wearing a 'Tika' on the forehead. Everything is forgotten slowly. All the traditions taught remained useess.

Today we hardly see people visiting temples for praying on their birthdays. The importance of blessings had been lost somewhere. People are happy to get the blessings in the form of abbreviations like 'GBU' (God bless you). People are happy with things which do not exist in the universe. And somewhere they forget to live in the reality. 

The worst tradition we can find going on today is the rash birthday parties. People waste a large sum of money on unnecessary things. The cake which is bought for eating is actually wasted in applying it on  birthday boys/girls face. Who on earth did invent this tradition God knows. But I can surely tell I hate it. I am brought up in a family where I am taught food is next to God and we should never disrespect it. But here while celebrating the most important day of our life, we waste the food by applying it on each other faces. What a shame. We highly intellectual people behave in such a way, this is really a sad thing. We should not encourage such type of practices. Instead we could properly celebrate the special day without wasting a single morsel of food.

I am not against the Celebration of Birthdays. I just want to show you that the things which we do unexpectedly lead to a larger loss, one way or other. So if next time you are up for a birthday celebration, please celebrate responsibly. :-) 

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