Party Culture

I hope this is the only time, and the longest time, I will have to think about birthday parties. It’s probably not.

So this year has been sudden immersion into birthday party culture. Seems like everyone has a birthday in the fall; we’ve been to party after party in the past few weeks. They all involve themes, decorations, elaborate cakes, stuffed favor bags, games, entertainment, and a horrific amount of junk food. Staples being juice, soda, pizza, all manner of candy. Given we have a no-juice rule and consider fruit snacks a major treat, I hardly know what to tell her when an adult offers her non-diet Coke.

At first we wanted to keep her birthday simple and quiet, mostly in reaction to this oddly comparative party culture, where kids start to feel like they have to have a party like this or that other person, or even worse, when parents feel the need to impress each other. I just asked her what she wanted, and for a while, it was just chocolate ice cream. She just wanted to invite her brother. Great!

Then she started going to all these parties, and said she wanted one too. She wanted to invite friends. I thought about how we tend to under-celebrate in our family, probably as a result of how we were raised, and how it can be a good and healthy thing to celebrate milestones in life—an opportunity to be grateful, to reflect, to affirm. I figure I’ll try to do this without copping into the whole party culture, so we decide to do a small party. I take her to get the things she likes (blue plates, chocolate cake), prepare some healthier food options (with still some cookies and candy), let her pick balloons and simple favors. Two kids and two adults come in addition to my parents, and it’s at our house.

Turns out she had a blast—and she probably would have been just as happy if there was a smaller cake, a hand-written banner, and fewer treats—she mostly wanted to play with the other kids. She took about two bites of her cake and ice cream total. Most of the details of décor, favors, food went over her head. She was just as happy with one good present as with twenty—in fact, too many presents and it becomes an overload, so I ended up stashing the few extra she got for later.

In the end, I guess it was about understanding her—that as an increasingly obvious extrovert, she just wanted to play with some other kids, to feel special with a few things. I figure I’ll enjoy the age when things are this simple as long as I can. I’m continually surprised at her capacity for self-denial—for putting things back on the shelf when I tell her we don’t need it, or for sticking to one juice box when everyone else is having two. The degree of joy and delight she takes in experiences doesn’t necessarily correlate with materialism, which is pretty amazing and something I could learn more about.