Our Birthday Rituals
Here are some of our family's favourite birthday traditions
We’ve just wrapped up birthday season in our house where six of us have birthdays within a 3-month period. The birthday bunting goes up and comes down only to go back up again on repeat at this time of year. Same goes for our birthday ring — I always take great care in putting it together, adding the little wooden figures and number(s) suitable for each child, only for it to be packed back into its box ready for the next birthday a couple weeks later.
I love birthday rituals. Like seriously love them. There’s something so comforting about the way these familiar gestures and simple objects return year after year, adding a bit of magic to the moment while connecting us to all the birthdays before. Our kids love them too. In fact, they often ask to stay up past their bedtime to help string up the bunting or set up the table for their sibling’s birthday the next morning. The excitement of a birthday is felt by everyone.
We’ve had the same red felt birthday crown since our first baby turned one, and it comes out at every single birthday. (We recently added a navy ribbon tie to the back so it would fit the big boys’ heads!) Same with the bunting — we bought the first colourful string of birthday bunting in a cute store in Antwerp nearly two decades ago, then another in a shop in Paris later that year. Over the years, we’ve added a few more to our collection, and now our little cotton drawstring bag filled with bunting is one of my most treasured belongings. It even travelled around the world with us on our gap year ten years ago, taking up precious space in my suitcase.
We’ve had the same cake topper candle holder since Ivy’s first birthday, which now gets poked into a stack of pancakes on every birthday morning. It makes me so happy that these little items will feature in the kaleidoscope of memories my children will cherish.
Some of our rituals come from our own childhoods; others are more recent. A few years ago, on the day before Ivy’s birthday, I bought a bunch of dahlias from a farm stall on the drive home from school. It felt like a fun way to start the birthday celebrations one day early, and I knew they’d look pretty on the breakfast table the following day. We’ve carried on this tradition ever since. How fun to start a birthday a day early, right? The birthday ring is also a relatively new addition, something we discovered after our kids joined our Steiner (Waldorf) school. We also learned a new birthday song at the school, which we’ve since added to our usual birthday chorus, alongside the Dutch version from my own childhood, ‘Lang zal ze leven’.
It’s really never too late to start a new ritual or tradition! I thought I’d share a list of our family’s rituals, including links to some of our favourite celebratory objects. Perhaps there’s an idea here for you to adopt, or the spark of a new idea entirely. I’ll also share a little bit about how we approach birthday parties (in all my parenting years, I’ve never hosted an all-class party and I will explain why)…
Our birthday rituals…
We always make the kids pancakes for breakfast on their birthday. We give them the choice of skinny pancakes (crepes) or fat pancakes, we top them with berries and then use our candle holder to hold the candle. We sing ‘happy birthday’ followed by the Dutch version of the song, a tradition that comes from my Dutch grandparents. We recently added a new song, which we learned when Marlow was in kindergarten. It goes like this:
“It was [8] years ago today, today
That [Wilkie] came down from the heavens to stay.
He came to bring gladness and joy to the earth,
[His parents] and [siblings] attended his birth.
So let us all join now in singing,
with heavenly birthday bells ringing.
Happy birthday dear [Wilkie],
Happy birthday dear [Wilkie].”