Recently, Amy at Raising Arrows posted how their family celebrates birthdays. Our way is very similar!
We have a birthday once a month, or thereabouts (well, two in May, and none in September, October, or December).
Birthdays are a line item on our monthly budget.
We generally don’t have a major party with favors, activities, goodie bags, etc.
We do invite family and friends over for a meal and cake. The whole family, so we’ll have a house full of people but they won’t all be, for example, 6 year old girls.
I make a cake (occasionally, store bought). I would love to take a Wilton’s class but it hasn’t worked out so far. So I muddle through the best I can, using fruit rollups to make roses and shredded coconut and slivered almonds to cover up mistakes. The birthday child helps bake and decorate it (if they want to, and they always want to!)
We have presents. We let the kids take a friend on a special trip, sometimes. Miss E chose to take her sister and her best friend skating.
The birthday child gets to pick out birthday cereal (Cocoa Puffs are popular – Mr R can eat them) and gets a day off chores. We also usually take the day off school – it’s a family holiday! Like the Queen’s birthday, I suppose. They also get to choose a favorite meal for dinner. Even if it’s not Real Food, fun cereal is a special treat and a nice change from oatmeal.
We light candles, sing, eat cake and ice cream, play, and often watch a movie. Once a month is just about right for whatever new release kid’s movie is out on Netflix.
You can see a typical birthday on my post about Mr X turning 2.
How do you celebrate birthdays?
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This is MileHiMama’s younger sister, and when we were growing up we’d celebrate birthdays with the birthday child not only choosing (and helping to bake) the cake of his or choice, but after Sunday Mass the birthday kid got to choose where to go out for lunch. For most of our childhoods, birthday lunches were the only time we went to restaurants! I remember those times quite fondly, and always thought it was the BEST way to celebrate!
We don’t usually have parties. I gave the kids the choice to have a party or get $100 cash & they always pick the cash. We buy a store bought cake and take the child out to eat wherever they want to go.
We do about the same with a homemade cake, no big shindig party, and modest gifts. With 6 kids I have no desire to go all out many times a year and all the boys have their birthdays while we are up in Maine for the summer. My 10 year old’s birthday this year was the day of the big blizzard and she was sick in bed. She and I went to the thrift store on the next 50% off day and I bought her an enormous bag of clothes and stuff as her main gift.