Happy Birthday to You

Of late, I've been thinking a lot about birthdays (well, I haven't, actually, but a chap's got to have a topic to write about, hasn't he?). It seems a little strange to me, celebrating the day you came into the world, crying a lot and pooping excessively. And let's face it, the way we celebrate birthdays is a little creepy. I mean, think about this:

'Several people are gathered around an object on fire, chanting a repetitive song. One among them carries a knife. They extinguish the object and plunge the knife into it. The rest of the group stops chanting and spontaneously bursts into applause. '  - Description of a birthday party by some chap on Tumblr

I mean, come on, tell me that doesn't sound like a scene from a cult horror film. But, strange cult rituals aside, I decided to do some research (read: click the first three links on a Google search) about birthdays. So, read on to learn some stuff about birthdays that you may or may not really care about.

First off, no one knows birthdays were first celebrated (actually, Wikipedia doesn't know when birthdays were first celebrated, but I assume that the entirety of mankind's learning through the ages is hosted on Wikipedia's servers). I'm actually not even going to try to guess when they began, because whatever date I come up with, someone is certain to come up with an even older date and tell me, "Come on, Ritvik, do some real research next time!" I also feel quite good about myself because I just successfully dedicated an entire paragraph to something I'm not actually going to tell you about.

So, what do people actually do on birthdays? We all know the kind of birthday where we have a cake and a bunch of people singing the Happy Birthday song (apparently, it's actually the last stanza of the "Good Morning To You" song by Patty and Mildred Hill. I still find it hard to get over the fact that I've been calling this song by  the wrong name for the entirety of my existence). In Ghana, the birthday kid gets something called "oto", which  is a dish made of made of fried, mashed sweet potato and eggs. Frankly, I'd be much happier to get a pizza and some cake or, considering it's Ghana, some chocolate, but as they say, to each their own.

Other cultures only celebrate certain birthdays. For instance, teenagers in most cultures celebrate the acquisition of the age of majority by waiting until their parents are asleep and then getting obscenely drunk at the nearest public house. Jewish boys celebrate something called a 'Bar Mitzvah' on their 13th birthdays (girls, for some reason, have it on their 12th birthdays and call it a 'Bat Mitzvah'). Honestly, I've no clue what exactly they have to celebrate, because it represents the day that they have to begin actively participating in the rituals and can no longer stay home and  watch TV while Mom and Dad head off to the synagogue. Hindu boys celebrate their 13th birthdays by sitting in front of a fire and pouring ghee into it while a priest mutters words under his breath in a language that no one really understood in the first place. And in return for their trouble, they get a string tied from their shoulders to their waists and the added responsibility of saying a mantra 108 times every day.

All of this has been an extremely long way of saying that I had no clue what I was going to write about today. I seized on the topic of birthdays because my mother's was last week. Anyway, thanks for reading. If you know about any other birthday rituals, tell me in the comments. Actually, just give me a comment saying anything at all. Seriously, if you don't, I'm coming to your house with a knife - and I ain't bringing no cake.