Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Evangelical
How Important Are Birthdays Anyway?

How Important Are Birthdays Anyway?

Last updated on: May 27, 2024 at 9:36 pm by Melissa Borja

0 Comments

How Important Are Birthdays Anyway? 2024-05-27T21:36:34-04:00 Melissa Borja

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

The author and her brother eating birthday cake, ca. 1986.

Today is my birthday. As a religion scholar, I’ve long been fascinated by the rituals of specific holidays, and I’ve written several posts about how Americans observe a range of religious and secular feast days: Lent, Chrismukkah, snow days. Today, as I begin a new revolution around the sun, I’d like to discuss the holiday of the birthday.

Birthdays and their associated rituals intrigue me because the truth is that I’m something of a birthday grinch. I was raised in a practical immigrant family that was a bit skeptical of American birthday rituals. In all my 42 years, I’ve never had a birthday party. And while I’ve often had some sort of birthday cake–I’m particularly fond of vanilla cake with pink frosting and rainbow sprinkles–birthdays have generally been low-key affairs for me, to the point that they’re often non-events. For this reason, the fact that other people celebrate birthdays, sometimes extravagantly, piques my curiosity. What’s the point? What are birthdays all about?

According to the historian Hizky Shoham, birthdays in modern societies matter because they’re occasions when we reckon with a force that affects all of us: time. As he argues in his essay “It Is About Time,” people in the United States and around the world care about birthdays because “numerical age in itself has become a major meaning-maker in modern culture, whereby the counting of years constitutes the object of a whole ritual system, which recapitulates the individual life course.” In Shoham’s analysis,

Birthdays as “Rites of Temporality”

Birthday celebrations have a long history that reaches back to antiquity. In ancient Egypt, Persia, and Greece, men of high social status regularly celebrated birthdays. In ancient Rome, ordinary people also celebrated birthdays by offering cake and wine at the family altar–men, as part of the cult of Genius, and women, as part of the cult of Juno. Birthday celebrations among everyday people in Europe waned during the Middle Ages, and the Catholic church during this period discouraged birthday celebrations, which were viewed as promoting pride and worship of self; honoring the saint feast days close to one’s date of birth was more common. However, the period after the Renaissance witnessed a resurgence in common birthday observances because of three factors: the rise of Protestantism and the decline in the cult of sainthood; the growing recognition of childhood as a distinct period of life; and the development of the printing press, which helped make household calendars more common and increased everyday people’s awareness of specific dates, including birthdays.

The Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century was a particularly important turning point, the moment when, according to Shoham, the standardization of time and the increased emphasis on the nuclear family and childhood converged to transform birthday celebrations into “rites of temporality” organized around numerical age. As he explains,

Rites of temporality mark the passage of time by latching on to artificial milestones, themselves derived from ostensibly objective mathematical computations. For individuals in the age-stratified societies of the Industrial Age and thereafter, this system of rituals replaced or assimilated the classic Rites de Passage as the principal ritual system dramatizing transitions between stages of life. But rather than the transitions in social status that characterized the Rites de Passage, rites of temporality highlight transitions between mathematical categories framed as a rough symbolization of biographical progress, although also presented as objective measures. This ritual system features time itself as a central meaning maker, by marking time’s most eminent social symbolization in modern industrial societies: numbers.

According to Shoham, birthdays matter because they focus on numerical age and time, and numerical age and time have given us modern humans important new ways of understanding ourselves. Birthdays are ritual systems and rites of temporality that, as Shoham explains, “use mathematical conventions to delineate the celebrant in three ways”:

First, they historicize the celebrant, by synchronizing it/him/her with anything and anyone else on a scale of “before” and “after.” Second, they individuate the celebrant, given that everyone/everything is positioned differently on a single time axis. But at the same time, thirdly, rites of temporality democratize the celebrant, positioning everybody equally in the presence of indifferent time, which will continue to pass anyway, regardless of the ritual.

The placement of individuals on a single time axis may be why children are the focus of the most enthusiastic birthday celebrations. When an individual is young and positioned lower on the time axis, people feel a greater sense of possibility. In contrast, celebrating birthdays and recognizing increasing numerical age reminds us adults of our finite time alive and the comparatively few years we have left.

Ultimately, birthdays are significant as celebrations of time lived. As “regulative temporal institutions,” birthdays and the time they mark are “meaning-making institutions.” As Shoham writes,

The rise of rites of temporality reveals time as much more than a way to regulate social life; rather, it is a way to derive meanings. From the Industrial Age onward, people increasingly saw themselves (and the groups and institutions that they belonged to) as temporal, historical beings. Their existence has a beginning, an end, and some form of progression or development in-between, quantified by common individuals in mathematical units. Rites of temporality mark arithmetic progressions, which describe the biography of the celebrant—individual, group, place, or institution—as a linear progression from beginning to (possible) end, split into solar years. These arithmetic progressions provide meaning to people’s lives…People know how they are supposed to feel when numerical age changes and they enter teenage, middle age, or retirement age—and act accordingly, try to ignore it, or revolt.

What Does It Mean to Be Forty-Two Years Old?

American popular culture offers abundant examples of how modern humans invest significant meaning in numerical age. Take, for example, the wistful lyrics about the dreams of youth in Lukas Graham’s ballad “Seven Years,” where the age of seven represents childhood innocence:

Once, I was seven years old

It was a big-big world but we thought we were bigger

Pushing each other to the limits, we were learning quicker

And consider the reflections on old age and lifelong companionship in the Beatles’ song “When I’m Sixty-Four“:

When I get older losing my hair

Many years from now

Will you still be sending me a Valentine

Birthday greetings bottle of wine

If I’d been out till quarter to three

Would you lock the door

Will you still need me

Will you still feed me

When I’m sixty-four

In addition to the meanings assigned to specific ages and lifetime moments, there are the birthday rituals we practice that focus on numbers. These rituals include songs we sing to honor numerical age, such as the count-and-clap coda that young children chant upon the conclusion of “Happy Birthday”: “Are you one? Are you two? Are you three?” (This addendum becomes tedious and significantly less funny around age nine, but it becomes utterly hilarious again around, say, age fifty-seven.)

These birthday rituals also involve number-focused activities, both on the day of the birthday and in the weeks leading up to it. As a millennial, I have many friends who recently turned forty years old, and many of them planned a series of celebratory birthday adventures, often related to the number forty, that demonstrate their continued youthfulness, whimsy, physical strength, and zest for life. These #40before40 projects have involved, among other things, running marathons, getting a dog, or sometimes posting forty photos of loved ones on Facebook.

Birthday rituals associated with numerical age even shape what we wear. My daughter turns sixteen years old this year, as do many of her friends, and her spring calendar is filled with sweet sixteen birthday parties. In film and on television, sixteen-year-old girls are the embodiment of romantic innocence–girls like lovelorn Liesl Von Trapp, who danced around a gazebo in the Sound of Music and sang “Sixteen Going on Seventeen” with Rolf, well before she realized he would turn out to be a Nazi. In keeping with the cultural meanings associated with sixteen, my daughter chose to wear a ruffled, bow-bedecked pale pink dress to wear to a friend’s sweet sixteen party this coming weekend. For most social events, I recommend a Little Black Dress as the outfit of choice, but not for a birthday party for a sixteen-year-old girl. Like my daughter, I know what sixteen means.

But the meanings we assign to particular numerical ages are also contested. For me, on my forty-second birthday, I wonder: what does it mean to be forty-two years old? Forty-two seems like the age equivalent of mayonnaise: somewhere in the middle of things, generally regarded as unremarkable, and yet it manages to provoke polarized opinions. At a party yesterday, I mentioned that I was turning forty-two, and a friend remarked on how young I am. (“You could still have another baby!” she told my husband. He looked a little panicked at the suggestion, considering we’re only two years away from being empty nesters.) But forty-two years feels a bit more ominous to me. Aware that the life expectancy of the average woman in the United States is around eighty years, I’m likely well into the third quarter of my life, and as a Detroit Lions fan, I know things can really go south in the third quarter. Rather than associating forty-two with new life, I tend to associate this age with unpleasant midlife medical responsibilities (mammograms, colonoscopies) and milestone school reunions that make me wonder about my squandered potential. (Later this week, in fact, I attend my twentieth college reunion later, and two decades since graduating, it’s hard not to feel rather unaccomplished when your classmates include the U.S. Secretary of Transportation and a comedian on Saturday Night Live.)

If I’m unsure about how to feel about being forty-two years old, I also find myself uncertain about how to celebrate being forty-two years old. As I mentioned at the top of this post, birthdays are non-events in my family, and we generally do very little to celebrate them. And this year, I’m celebrating my birthday in probably the least festive way imaginable: by hanging out in the intensive care unit, where my father has spent the past week recovering from a sudden illness that caused respiratory distress and plunging blood oxygen levels. In these circumstances, I find myself surprisingly hungry to set aside my life-long rejection of birthday celebrations and plan an extravagant party when he turns seventy-five years old this summer. If he makes it to his birthday on July 31, it’ll certainly be a victory worth celebrating. And if we’re going to celebrate his birthday, why don’t I celebrate other birthdays, like my own? Indeed, if there’s anything I’ve learned by camping out in the hospital for a week, it’s that tomorrow’s never promised.

Shoham gestures to this revelation in the conclusion of his essay. “Rites of temporality celebrate the existence of things important to us: friends, family members, our locality, nation, and so forth,” he writes. “At the same time, they also hint at the fact that these things are finite. This ritual system maintains a cosmology and a mythology, according to which everything is part of history: subject to time and unable to escape or transcend it. In modern temporal experience, time stands above all things in the world. Nothing can transcend it; it transcends everything else.” Time, Shoham says, is “an indifferent god.”

In turn, it does us mortals no favors to be indifferent to time. So I’m going to resolve to break out the cake and the party hats and celebrate the birthdays. It’s about time.

Holidays

Melissa Borja

Ritual

Previous Post

May 23, 2024

On Being a Public Intellectual, Lord Help Us

Next Post

May 28, 2024 A "Just Peace" for Both Israel and the Palestinians

Recent Comments

0 | Leave a Comment

"There are no such things as witches. They were just unmarried or elderly women with ..."

Dot Newkirk

How Scotland Gave Us Our Modern ..."

"The book of THE KEEP is wonderful, but I was not such a fan of ..."

philipjenkins

Fairies, Witches, Folk Horror, and the ..."

"A similar film from the late 80s was The Hidden with Kyle MacLachlan. I get ..."

Terry

Fairies, Witches, Folk Horror, and the ..."

"Life Force is a guilty pleasure of mine! Not a great film, but a fun ..."

philipjenkins

Fairies, Witches, Folk Horror, and the ..."

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category abolitionism Abortion Abraham Joshua Heschel Abraham Kuyper Abraham Lincoln Academia Activism Adam Renberg Advent Adventist africa African American Religion Agnes Howard Albert Camus American History American Religious History American Revolution American West Anabaptists Ancient History Andrea Turpin Andrei Tarkovsky Anglicanism Annales Ansley Lillian Quiros anti-Catholicism Antisemitism Anxious Bench apologetics Apparitions Arash Azizi Archaeology archives art Artificial Intelligence Asia Asian Americans Augustine Authors Bad Bunny Baptism Baptists Barack Obama Battle of Hastings Benjamin Franklin Bernard-Henri Levy Beth Allison Barr Beth Moore Bethany Mannon Bible Bill Cunningham Billy Graham Black Music Bob Dylan Body Boenhoffer Books Breastfeeding Bruce Springsteen C.S. Lewis Calvinism Cancel Culture Capitalism Carmelites Catholicism Cedric Robinson Cesar Chavez Charismaticism charity Charles Dickens Charles Lindbergh Che Guevara Chicago Children Chinese Christianity Chris Gehrz Christ Christian death Christian Higher Education Christian life Christian Nation Christian Nationalism Christianity Today Christmas Church life Church Practice cinema Civil Religion Civil Rights Movement Civil War civility Classics Climate Change Cold War Colonial Mexico colonialism Comer Communism community complementarianism Conference on Faith and History Congregationalism Conspiracies Conspiracy Conversion Narratives Coronavirus Costa Rica Council of Nicaea Covid-19 Creation Critical Race Theory Crusades Culture culture wars Daniel K. Williams David Barton David Swartz Death Ways death with dignity DEI democracy Democratic Party Devotion Digital Age Diplomacy discipleship diversity Donald Trump Drama Dua Lipa Early Church early modern Early modern Catholicism Easter Eastern Christianity economic exploitation Education elections Elie Wiesel Elizabeth II Elizabeth Taylor emotions Empire Engineering England enslavement Entertainment Episcopal Church Erica Ramirez eschatology Eurocentrism Evangelicalism Evangelicals Exegesis Family Feminism Film Flannery O'Connor folk music Food Foreign Policy founding fathers Franciscans Franciscus Junius fundamentalism Funerals G.K. Chesterton Gender Genocide genre geography George W. Bush George Washington George Whitefield Global Christianity Global church Grief Guadalupe guest post Guest Post gun control gun violence Gustavo Gutierrez Hamid Dabashi Harold John Ockenga Harvest Hate Hawaiian Christianity Healing health care Heather Cox Richardson Hell Heresy Hermeneutics Higher Education Hinduism Hippocratic oath Historical Fiction Historical Methodology Historical Profession Historical Profession Historical Theology Historical Thinking historiography Holidays Holocaust horror movies Human rights Humanitarian Work humanities Hummingbirds Hungary hymns Imago Dei Immigration Injustice Interviews Iran Islam Islamophobia Israel Ivan's Childhood Jacob Randolph James Bratt Janine Giordano Drake Japanese history Japanese Literature Jean Paul Sartre Jesse Miranda Jesus Jesus Christ Jimmy Carter Joan Baez Joan Didion Joanne Freeman João B. Chaves Joao Chaves Joey Cochran John Calvin John Fea John Tillotson John Turner Johnny Cash Jonathan Edwards Jonathan Tran Joseph Smith Josh Howerton Journalism Jr. Judaism Jürgen Moltmann Just War Justice Justin Brierley Karl Barth Katelyn Beaty koi ponds Kris Kristofferson Kristin Kobes Du Mez Latin American Religious History Latino Americans Lectio Divina Leisure Lent Leonard Cohen liberal arts liberalism Liberation Theology Linda Ronstadt Lisa Clark Diller Literature Lou Reed Lynchings Lynneth Miller Renberg Mainline Protestantism Malcolm Foley Marilyn Monroe Maritime history Mark Noll Marriage Martin Luther Martin Luther King Martyrdom Marxism Mary Masih Alinejad mass shootings material culture medieval Christianity Medieval Ethiopia Melissa Borja memory Mennonites Mental Health Mental Illness Methodism Mexican Americans Mexicans Mike Madrid Miles Mullin Min Jin Lee Miscarriage Missionaries Mister Rogers Mitt Romney modernity Monasticism Mormonism Motherhood Mothers of the Church Moving Music Musicals Nadya Williams Nahua Christianity Native Americans Natsume Sōseki New Contributor New England New Year New York Nico Non-Violent Protest Orthodoxy pacifism Paleo Evangelicals Palestinians Parenting Patti Smith Paul Kingsnorth Pedro Calderón de la Barca Pentecostalism Philip Jenkins Phillis Wheatley physician-assisted suicide pilgrimage Pilgrims pluralism Plutocracy Poetry Politics Pope Francis Pope Leo XIV post-modernism prayer preaching Presbyterians prosperity gospel Protest Public history Publishing Puritans purity culture Quakers race Race Massacres Racial Capitalism racial reconciliation racialization Racism Raha Bahloulipour Re-Enchantment reading Reformation Refugees religion and the university religion and war Religious Freedom Religious Nones Religious Pluralism Religious Symbols religious violence Republican Party Revival Rita Coolidge Ritual Roger Williams Roman Catholic church Royalty Russell Moore same-sex marriage Sarah Irving-Stonebraker Scandinavia Science Science and Technology Scopes trial Scriptural Interpretation secularism Selena Quintanilla seminary Seventh-Day Adventists sexual morality Sexuality Sikhs Silence slaveholders theology Slavery Slavoj Zizek social justice Social Media Southern Baptist Convention Southern Religion Spain Spiritual Autobiography Spiritual but not religious Spiritual Discipline Sports Stanley Hauerwas Suffering Summer Camps Sunday Night Odds and Ends Supernatural Supreme Court Syriac Christianity Tal Howard Taylor Swift Teaching Technology Television Thanksgiving The Beatles The Mission theater TheoBros Theology Thomas Dixon Thomas Jefferson Thomas Kidd Thomas Merton Tim Gloege Tim Walz Tom Holland Tourism tradition Tragedy Translation Transnationalism Travel Trump Ukraine Uncategorized Unitarians United Methodist Church US History Vanessa Chan Velvet Underground Verónica A. Gutiérrez Veronica Gutierrez Vikings Violence Virgin Mary Virtue Virtue ethics Visions Voting War WCTU Wendell Berry Westminster Assembly White Evangelicalism Wildfires Winnie the Pooh Witches women Women in Ministry Women's and Gender Studies Work Worship writing Yasunari Kawabata Zena Hitz

Select a Month October 2026 September 2026 August 2026 July 2026 June 2026 May 2026 April 2026 March 2026 February 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

According to Philippians, whose name is above every name?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Jesus The Lord God Christ