International Day of Births

I’m beginning to find it difficult to keep up with this birthday thing. People are having birthdays ALL the time, all over the place. It can get a bit overwhelming. I mean, I have nothing against birthdays – if we didn’t have birthdays we wouldn’t even be here to comment on them, right? But couldn’t the whole thing be done in a slightly more systematic and organised way? Like look at the UN – they have an International Day or Week or even a Year for, say, the Girl Child or Political Refugees, and we can all say sympathetic things about them then and forget about the whole thing the rest of the time. Couldn’t we have a similar arrangement for birthdays? If we can have one Anti-Tobacco Day a year and lay off the smokers for the rest of the year, why can’t we do this with birthdays too? See – supposing we had an International Day of Births as early in the year as we can, say Jan 2 since Jan 1 is already taken – then we could get it over with at one go and live happily ever after for the remaining 363 days of that year. And if we're all agreed on Jan 2, we could just send everyone New Year-cum-birthday greetings at one go. On The Day of Births everyone would have a huge noisy rambunctious whale of a party, and the neighbours wouldn’t even complain because they would also be having a huge noisy rambunctious whale of a party of their own. There could be Birthday Groups of friends or families, where everyone could take turns hosting the party, sort of like carpooling.

Now doesn’t that sound like a good thing to you? Not much chance of forgetting anyone’s birthday, big-time saving on time and effort wishing people round the year. And best of all, parents could finally relax about gifts and back-gifts and putting up a better show than those uppity parents of their kids’ friends because everyone would be too busy celebrating their own birthdays to be able to go to anyone else’s party, and then go around afterwards saying how the cake was too dry and how they know a better event manager who would have done a much better job…

Good idea, no? What, you don’t agree? Well, then I’m not going to send you a Facebook gift on your birthday, so there!