Early birthday celebrations
This is gonna be a short post. I’m exhausted from the last couple days and I need to take a break from all the news and social media. I felt paralyzed all day yesterday and spend too much time following the post election commentaries. Today I went to the gym and while I was working out I started thinking about my daily post and about my upcoming birthday. I’m gonna have a small dinner party and I’m looking forward to the weekend. It’ll be a good time to celebrate, to be with friends and loved ones, to laugh and eat well.
Every year when my birthday is coming up, I notice some differences between American birthday celebrations and German birthday traditions. First of all what you wish someone. In English you say “happy birthday” and that’s actually what many Germans do as well. But in German you say “Herzlichen Glückwunsch zum Geburtstag” which means “heartfelt congratulations for your birthday”. They basically congratulate you that you made another year vs. the opposite.
The biggest difference for me is that Americans don’t have any problem to celebrate their birtdays early. If your birthday is on the Wednesday of spring break, you might be invited to a party on the weekend before spring break, so about 10 days earlier than the day when you were born. This was hard for me to understand in the beginning. In Germany no one I know would celebrate a birthday until the actual day of the event.
Americans even wish you a “happy early birthday” if they think they might not see you on the actual day. In Germany this is considered bad luck. It’s not that I’m personally very superstitious about it, but this is just the way I was brought up. Birthdays are supposed to be celebrated on the real date or promptly after. Many people have a party the night before their birthday and celebrate with champagne and a cake with candles at midnight. But no guest would wish you “happy birthday” before that. That’s why every time someone here wishes me “Happy early birthday” I twitch. It still feels weird to me. I know that they mean well, but I still think it’s much better to wish someone a “happy belated birthday” instead. I love this short and crisp expression much better than the German “Alles Gute nachträglich zum Geburtstag!”.
The great thing about the Americans is that they are generally much more laid back and are not offended if you didn’t congratulate them on their actual birthday. They like to extend their birthday celebrations to a “birthday week” or even a “birthday month” so that the day itself doesn’t have the same status as it has for the Germans. I love that concept, because there can be never enough parties and never enough cake for a German, but please wait until it actually is your birthday 😉
Th
is is my favorite birthday cake, my mom made it almost every year for me I think.
It’s called “Kalter Hund” oder “Kalte Schnauze” (cold dog/cold snout) and it is super rich and super delicious. Here is a recipe.
Happy early ……., wait NO!
This post is a part of a series called NaBloPoMo 2016 hosted by BlogHer. NaBloPoMo is short for National Blog Posting Month and it challenges writers and creatives to post on their blogs once a day (at least) for the month of November. You can find all my posts on my blogher page, too. Stay tuned!
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