Birthdays

Birthdays

For as long as I remember, compared to my two younger sisters, I have always had a blast on my birthday. First of all, it always falls on a holiday. Always, no matter which part of the world I am in. My second sister’s birthday is on April the 1st so she gets a different kind of attention with lots of trickery and tomfoolery involved. (We were wicked!) When baby sis was born 7 years after, her June 23rd birthday was proclaimed by Mum to be the most special birthdate in the universe, so she will never grow up to have a complex on competitive birthdates! Poor sis!

But to me, the 1st of January for a birthday ain’t all that grand, sometimes. The good things were that I always had a birthday cake as it always fell on a public holiday when my career teacher mum didn’t have to go to work, and I had more birthday parties or pressies and red eggs and longevity noodles than the other two hence my love affairs with soirees and such (but my lovely sisters now trump me be earning mega Singapore bucks so life is always fair, methinks :) and they get to escape the ludicrous farce of Malaysian political satires on a daily basis!)

But I remember the first of January as also being the date, as I grew older, when friends are sometimes to drunk to remember to wish me a Happy Birthday or then boyfriends, (and now husband) feels intense double pressures of having to make the day extra special for me. Poor guy(s). And sometimes, I get a triple greeting with Christmas bundled in too.

Thanks to Mark Zuckerberg, a socially-inept IT wunderkinder, my birthday now gets proclaimed for the world , or at least for my 400-ish friends on Facebook to see. So I get a tonne of instant birthday wishes on my ‘wall’. Thanks also to the world of texting and free apps like Whats App, my iphone receives all these exciting beeps announcing yet another message wishing me Happy Birthday along with Happy New Year- a very convenient double whammy.

As technology surges forward, old-fashioned birthday cards have, alas dwindled. My mum, bless her, still has a box of birthday cards in her closet at home, and in it, I am sure contains one very special card dated January 1, 1973 when my Aunt Lillian in Sydney sent me one with a picture of a yellow number one and some little ducklings & a little girl- of the vintage type- wishing her then very little and only niece a Happy 1st Birthday. I used to look at that card over and over again through many rites of passage. 38 plus 1 birthdays later, I am still that old-fashioned little girl who loves her birthday cards and has never thrown a single one away.

Here’s to birthdays! Happy New Year 2011!

Love,
R

PS. I found this picture on google and it is almost like the one my Tua Ee sent me from Sydney dated 1st of January, 1973! Love you!