Episode 41 | Birthdays and New Years

Episode Transcript

Hello my friends, to another episode of your favorite spooky history podcast, Strange Origins! I’m so excited to be back at my desk to research and share some interesting facts with you. It’s been a few weeks longer than I expected since I last released an episode, and that’s because I’ve been very hard at work with a few different projects. Besides all the work required to make the Holidays happen on time, I have also been pretty busy working on an online store for my vintage shop, RebeccaPaigeVintage, and planning out future episodes of this podcast. 

Along with all of that, I also have been putting up transcripts for each of my past episodes up on my website, FascinatingPodcasts.com. So in case you have been wondering what I’ve been saying in my episodes when I jumble up a word or use a phrase you’ve never heard of, you can always go read the script for yourself. 

I also took a break between episodes because the space between my Birthday, November 26th, and New Year’s Eve, is a pretty hectic time that I like to fill with contemplation and planning. I like to take a minute to celebrate and to really try my best to feel grateful for every different aspect of my life. I also like to take notes on how it could be better in the future. 

Personally, I feel like these moments of reflection are a basic necessity on a yearly basis. We have so little that tethers us to the idea of time passing, and unless we take a minute to redirect our focus it can be pretty easy to drift off course. That’s where birthdays and New Years’ celebrations collide in my opinion. They both involve a rebirth of sorts. Each year we can press a reset button. We can say our thanks for yet another period of time we were allowed on this planet and redirect our sails to a sunnier shore, or at least towards a future with a few less bad habits. 

While today it’s pretty common for people, at least those in the U.S, to celebrate their birthdays in the same manner, it’s pretty interesting to me just how much traditions can range from simple to elaborate. The same concept goes for New Year as well. While in the U.S. our celebration of the New Year is pretty simple, usually involving some champagne, a countdown, and a kiss at midnight, it’s actually a much bigger deal in other countries and involved a lot more meaning behind it. 

So where did the paths diverge in history? And the question I’m pretty interested in; how did they even start in the first place? 

Ancient Birthdays

Based on a few different sources, the concepts of birthdays and New Years’ didn’t really begin to gain traction until the invention of the calendar, which actually makes perfect sense. But even after people were able to track when an important day was coming up, recognition of something as trivial as a birthday was reserved for only the most important of figures. 

One of the most famous mentions of a birthday celebration was in reference to a Pharaoh in Genesis, the first book of the Bible. It is important to note that it is strongly believed that that specific celebration may be in reference to the day of his coronation, which by Egyptians was believed to be the day that the Pharoah ascended to Godhood. So it didn’t really have a lot to do with that person’s day of birth.  

Beyond that, it was really the Pagans that brought the idea of birthdays into popularity. This was because of the belief that spirits were more present on days in your life when a big change was to happen or had already happened. To help keep away any spirits that wished ill of you, it was best to light a few candles and surround yourself with people who loved you as a form of protection. One of those days when it was best to protect yourself was on your birthday. 

The Greeks, in a similar fashion, believed that everyone had a spirit who attended them on their birthday and kept watch over them. While Roman citizens did enjoy the birthdays of their friends and families, it was the government that first created public holidays honoring the birthdays of famous members of the community. This eventually led to the tradition of gifting any Roman man turning fifty years of age a special cake baked with wheat flour, olive oil, grated cheese, and honey. Female birthdays, on the other hand, were not allowed until the 12th century.

 Because acknowledgment of a birthday was traditionally a pagan ritual, Christians didn’t celebrate their own, but rather observed their own Saints Day. Seeing as Christians at the time were named after a particular saint, they honored that saint by having a celebration on the day dedicated to that specific person. This is still a tradition honored in the Catholic and Orthodox parts of the world and is usually a small get-together where the honoree presents small snacks to those who bring him or her presents or well wishes.  

Special Birthdays

Today we have taken the concept of birthdays and combined them with the traditions that our ancestors used to symbolically present a change. This change is usually the transition from childhood to adulthood, but in certain parts of the world, the reasons for celebration can be different. On a child’s first birthday in Nepal and India, it is customary for the child’s head to be shaved and for those shavings to be burned in a special fire. The removal of that hair is meant to cleanse any evil from a past life that that child may have experienced and cleanses their soul. 

In the Jewish tradition, a girl’s 12th birthday and a boy’s 13th birthdays are cause for celebration as it signifies that they have reached maturity and are then able to make certain decisions for themselves. This, or any day after is when they are allowed to celebrate their bat mitzvahs or bar mitzvahs.

In a similar tradition, a young woman’s Quinceneara is the Latin American version of the transition from young adulthood to maturity. Beginning with a church Mass and ending with a giant party, a quinceanera includes food and drink, cake, gifts, dancing, and a court of male escorts. On occasion there are is also the tradition of presenting the young woman with her last doll, the smashing of fifteen small pinatas, or presenting the girl turning fifteen with her first bouquet as a woman. 

In Japan, there is the custom of your Coming of Age Day, which is celebrated on the second Monday in January following the year when you turn twenty years old. Women will wear a kimono featuring longer sleeves and zori sandals and the day is spent partying with other people who also turned twenty that year. 

Strange Traditions

Your birthday doesn’t have to be a big milestone to be enjoyable, though. In the U.S. it’s customary for people to celebrate with something sweet, gifts from loved ones, and now more than ever, well-wishes are posted on social media. But you might be wondering where a lot of our strange customs originated. 

As for my favorite tradition, that of eating cake on your birthday, we can thank the Germans. It was in the late 18th century that Germans first began celebrating Kinderfeste, which is the form of partying that is the closest to our modern version of a birthday party. Children, or kinder, were given a birthday cake that had been adorned with candles, one for each year they had been alive, plus one in the hopes that they would live yet another. This is also where the tradition of blowing out your candles while making a wish became a custom. In a lot of modern lore, it’s best to keep the wish you made a secret, or else it won’t come true. 

Its also believed that another reason that candles are used to adorn birthday cakes is thanks to the Greek Goddess Artemis. Goddess of the moon, those who wished to pay tribute to Artemis would offer up moon-shaped cakes with candles placed on them to symbolize the sending of prayer. Blowing out the candles was a way of sending a message, or a wish, to the god or goddess of your choice. 

As for the singing of Happy Birthday, a trend which more and more people my age seem to detest, it actually has a pretty interesting history. Before researching this topic I truly believed that the Happy Birthday song was much older than it was, but it was really only birthed in 1893 when it was created by two sisters, who were also Kentucky school teachers who originally titled it “Good Morning To All.” They published a book for the use of other teachers, originally intending for it to be sung by students as a way to start the day. When another musician added a few lyrics it slowly morphed into “The Birthday Song.” By 1933 it was used in an Irving Berlin musical and rightfully so, one of the sisters who wrote the song sued on the grounds of copyright infringement. The sisters won the case and the song garnered around $2 million a year for use of the song.

In the end, birthdays, like most subjects I discuss on this podcast, are just a mixture of different stages of history. 

New Years Beginnings

Surprisingly, given our modern obsession with the tradition of Christmas, it wasn’t until the 4th century that Christians began to celebrate the birth of Jesus. While it’s widely believed that the actual birth of Christ happened sometime between April and September, early Christians felt that a great way of converting pagan worshippers was to mesh this celebration with that of Saturnalia, which was a well-known Roman holiday. 

Saturnalia was a winter solstice holiday dedicated to the God Saturn who famously was responsible for bounty, agriculture, and time. While it was only supposed to last one day, it eventually grew into a weeklong party involving music, feasting, gambling, and gift-giving that lasted from December 17th to December 25th. Roman’s also adorned their homes with greenery and everyone wore much more colorful clothing as opposed to their plain togas. 

Traditionally wax taper candles were given as gifts to symbolize the light returning after the solstice. They also would hand out small terracotta figurines that are thought to have been references to earlier celebrations involving human sacrifice. 

Something I found fascinating was the concept of the Lord of Misrule. Much like we do today with the recently popularized Elf on a Shelf, Roman households would choose a leader that was in charge of making a little mischief happen during the week of partying. He would insult guests, chase around people, and was famous for wearing crazy outfits.

At least in the United States, birthdays became a fairly popular tradition due to two big factors: Industrialism and the rise of family planning. Before you could more easily control how many children you had, it was much more common for women to give birth to around seven or eight children in their lifetime in the seventeen to eighteen hundreds. And it was more than likely that more than a few of those babies would either die themselves or cause of the death of their mothers during childbirth. By the dawn of the twentieth century, though, that number had dropped to around three. It was then that families felt a little more comfortable spending money on a single child who they could afford to take better care of

The celebration of birthdays even led to a boom in commercialism with the observance of Christmas. Somehow, the tradition of honoring the birth of Christ merged with the mayhem of Saturnalia. Suddenly it was customary to buy loved ones gifts and to gather for parties every night of the week. Though themes of Christ are still present, more often than not Christmas seems to be a celebration of what Saturnalia was all about. Giving thanks for a bounteous harvest and reflecting on the time we have been given.

New Year Around The World

Speaking of time, another reason that Saturnalia existed was to say goodbye to the season before and prepare for a new year that started with January. Named after a Greek God it’s representative of the two faces that Janus sports, one facing forward, and one facing backward. He is also the God of new beginnings, transitions, doors, passages, and endings. 

An interesting Vietnamese tradition, in my opinion, is that of celebrating everyone’s birthday on the same day; New Years Day. For them, this will fall somewhere between January and February and is a time for visiting home, giving children red envelopes filled with money that is considered to be good luck, and attending parades featuring lions and dragons. There are a few superstitions surrounding the tradition of Tết. One of those superstitions includes avoiding sweeping, as to not sweep any good luck out of the door. It’s also normal to hear noise from people on the streets who will bang on drums, or light firecrackers in an attempt to ward off bad spirits. 

Besides birthday celebrations, New Year can be a chaotic good time anywhere. In Denmark, it’s customary for people to hold onto chipped dishes or glassware so that they can go around and smash them against the front doors of friends and neighbors on New Year’s Eve. In Spain, it’s tradition to start the New Year off right by eating twelve grapes, one for each stroke of midnight. And as for the kissing at midnight, it’s simply a way of warding off bad spirits at the start of the new year. This came from the idea that the first person you came across in the new year would determine the fate of the rest of your year, which is a lot of pressure for someone. 

Conclusion

I love the idea of being able to shed the mistakes and sadness of the past and being able to set yourself up for success in the New Year, whether that’s on your birthday or on January 1st. One of my favorite holiday songs, and one that is underrated in my opinion, is Auld Lang Syne. Originally a Scottish poem that was later set to music, it’s not a well-known fact that Auld Lang Syne means “Old Long Since.” The song is a reminder to remember the good times had, the friends you made along the way, and to take a cup of kindness yet, for those “times since passed.”

Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Strange Origins, my friends. I hope you learned something you didn’t know before today (because I know I did,) and don’t forget to keep it strange.