Happy Saturday!
Tomorrow is my dad’s birthday. Still going strong at 86. So tomorrow, we’re headed over to mum and dad’s for birthday cake and coffee. My two brothers and their wives will also be there. We’ll have a few laughs and celebrate my dad being here for another trip around the sun.
Remember having a birthday party as a kid? How exciting the day got to be as the hour for everyone to arrive drew closer and closer? And each guest was bringing a present for you! A laughter-filled afternoon of playing Pin The Tail On The Donkey (Yes, really, when I was a kid!), eating birthday cake while wearing those silly hats, and giving out the goodie bags when guests had to leave.
Goodie bags! Remember those? A tiny box of crayons, a googly-eyed eraser, a couple candies, a sheet of stickers or those water-transfer tattoos, some kind of noise maker, and one of those little BB-through-the-maze games. When you’re five, six, or seven years old, all that stuff is so cool! Why do we stop doing that?
As you get a little bit older, you reach the age of majority, somewhere between eighteen and twenty-one, depending on where you live, and you can legally go to the bar for the first time. That’s always a big deal and, I’d wager, there are more than a few highly amusing incidents as a result. But, no one gets goodie bags as they stagger out of the bar.
After that birthday, for a lot of us, being an adult kind of takes over, and birthdays become less and less of a special day, especially when the milestones start to hit. Thirty. Forty. Fifty. Along with those milestones come the smart-aleck, self-deprecating jokes like twenty-nine and holding; I’m not getting older, I’m getting wiser; and almost everyone’s favorite: it doesn’t mean anything, it’s just a number. My personal favorite: If you reach fifty and haven’t grown up, you never have to. (By the way, that one’s true — my wife can testify to my lack of grown-upness in spades!)
Most of you are aware of the special circumstances with regards to the birthday situation around here. (If you don’t know the story, I spoke about it here.) Even with that, we’ve never given out goodie bags when people went home but I’m thinking maybe we should start. Although, if we’re going to do that, I’m going to insist that everyone has to wear one of those cone-shaped birthday party hats with the elastic chin-strap.
How much fun would that be? And what would go into the goodie bags? For sure, a couple of those mini-bar-sized bottles of tequila. What else? Send me your best suggestions! Just hit reply and email them over. I’ll publish the list at the beginning of next Saturday’s post.
In the meantime, I’m going to watch the Oilers kick the butts of the Tampa Bay Lightning tonight and then tomorrow, I’m going to my dad’s birthday party. And while I’m reasonably sure I won’t leave with a goodie bag, there will be cake. And that’s a good thing.
Have a great weekend, y’all!