Now that spring has arrived, we are waiting for the weather to catch up with the calendar. It isn’t abnormal to get bad weather into the later part of March, as I remember very well. Since my birthday is March 23, I can recall many of my birthday parties having to be cancelled due to snow storms.
As I was growing up, it was common for people to have birthday parties. It was a neighborhood thing, and also a family thing. It always puzzled me how people knew when the party was, because most didn’t have telephones, at least I know we didn’t. This was well before cell phones or Facebook, so how did people know?
There are certain birthdays that I remember well. One was the year I was 6 and was missing some of my front teeth. Of course, I couldn’t say 6 correctly, and my dad would keep asking me how old I was, then he would tease me when I tried to say 6, and it came out more like sixth.
Often, my birthdays were marked with me sitting by the kitchen window watching the snow fall, and knowing no one could make it over the hill down to our farm for my party.
Truth to tell, I don’t remember even one gift or present I got for my birthday. The parties in those days were not for getting gifts, it was for getting together and spending time with friends and family.
This year, with my birthday falling on a Sunday, I have been thinking how to spend my day. I am sure one or more of my kids might invite me out to eat, but I wanted the whole family to be included. However, there are too many of them to ever find a perfect time to get together. So, I settled on just having an open house at my home in the afternoon.
I keep telling myself I am not going to get all fancy, just going to have simple finger type food, and I want the focus of the gathering to be visiting and talking to each other. I figure that people can come and go when it is convenient for them.
I am not sure how this is going to work. After all, with cell phones and the like, do young people even talk to each other anymore? I guess we will find out.
Plus, do I clean the floor before, or wait till people quit tracking through it and then clean the floor? I definitely do have to clean a little clutter. I might even run a dust rag over a few things. At my age, I usually can’t see the dust, so figure no one else will either, but I am probably wrong about that.
Meanwhile, I have to keep that word “simple” in my mind, because knowing me, I will go overboard and fuss, when in reality, it is my birthday, and I should not fuss.
My biggest decision will be dessert. Because my mother had chickens and an overabundance of eggs, she always made angel food cake for birthdays. I kept that tradition as my children grew up. However, I used a box mix and not one from scratch. One angel food cake isn’t enough for everyone, so it is either make two or just get a bakery cake.
I guess this is where the word “simple” comes into consideration.
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