Celebratory Craziness
By Lainey S. Cronk

Twelve elementary-age kids leap up and down, hollering incessantly at their teammates, who are laboring across the room garbed in oversized coats, rakish hats, and mismatched shoes. It’s one of the most popular games of my childhood: an un-named relay race that my mother found in some book, in which each member of two teams have to race down the room, throw on all the clothes piled there, run back and remove all their costume before hauling it back for the next contestant.

Despite a birthday falling just days before Christmas, I’ve had more than my fair share of marvelously zany birthday parties.   

We never once played pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey, because we were busy with Hagoo, Ali Babba, and a host of other games involving buttons, balloons, secret handshakes, and shoes. As I grew older, we celebrated by creating old-fashioned costumes for ourselves and taking black-and-white photos, or hosting Miss Hopeless America Pageants in which we enthusiastically helped each other into the most horrific possible costumes and hair-do’s, and then performed intentionally dreadful (and boy, were they ever dreadful!) “talents” on a makeshift stage.

Grown-up birthday parties can still be creative and memorable: an all-day trip with a friend and your moms to art museums, a truly surprising surprise party at your own house, friends taking you out to a unique theatre performance or throwing you a candle-lit picnic on a park lawn—with just enough time to pack the picnic basket before the sprinklers come on!

Regardless of whether the party is crazy like most of mine, or a more typical celebration with cake and pin-the-tail, the purpose is to have fun and to know that you’re loved (and, in many cases, to make a vast mess for the mom to clean up). Not to say that we can only experience that on a birthday... but it’s one day that’s specially devoted to that for the birthday girl or boy. And a birthday well celebrated is, indeed, a wonderful birthday present.