happy birthday! what - it's not your birthday? well, then i wasn't talking to you, was i?! sheesh.

in mexico, birthday celebrations often include a piñata which is a brightly colored, hollow papier-mâché sculpture filled with candy and small toys. the guests take turns bashing the piñata with a stick until it breaks like a junkie at a cop convention and spills its candy guts all over the ground for the kids to retrieve and enjoy. the most interesting thing about this tradition is that papier-mâché is a french word and piñata is not.

in china, many folks celebrate two birthdays: one on the solar calendar and one on the lunar calendar. exempli gratia: a boy born on July 31, 1972 on the solar (id est: normal) calendar would have his lunar (id est: luney) birthday on June 20. the chinese are a celebrating bunch - if you have ever done business with anyone in china you can attest to the fact that they are forever celebrating some new year or some dragon boat thing and are never there to answer your queries about the manufactury process in a timely manner. the celebrating is exacerbated by the dual calendaring system by which they end up celebrating everything twice and with the continual overlapping celebrations it is truly a wonder anything at all gets done there, hence the saying: on a slow boat from china.

in the philippines, the house of the birthday child is decorated with brightly colored lights so that the entire neighborhood knows there's a birthday going on there. this is especially helpful to the neighborhood bullies, as it provides clear guidance concerning which child will have new toys or a bit of extra pocket money this week. those philippians have totally streamlined the bullying process, to which we say: bully!

in russia, children get birthday pies instead of birthday cakes, yet another in a long list of tragedies that arise from being born a commie pinko.

in israel, the birthday child wears a crown of leaves or flowers and sits in a special chair of honor. guests dance around the chair singing while the child's parents lift chair with child, once for each year of the child's age. for this reason, you will find that most israeli children are quite slim, and birthdays are not celebrated after the age of 12 or the weight of 100lbs (whichever comes first). at age 13, the jewish child will have the bar or bat mitzvah. "bar" means boy and "bat" means girl and "mitzvah" means thank gd we don't have to pick this little brat up anymore.

in england, small tokens are baked into the birthday cake, so each slice contains a token which is thought to reveal the fortune of the person who gets that slice. an amusing game is to give the old folks the slice with the death token and watch them choke in fright on the very cake slice, thuswise fulfilling the destiny of the token. the brits invented birthday cards 100 or so years ago, and today an entire industry owes thanks to the brits' clotted emotional range which required an impersonal printed card to deliver endearing personal sentiments cleverly disguised in crude barnyard humour and sly witticisms.





(october has two birthstones, tourmaline and opal, both of which are known to contain many colors, both soft and fiery, and many facets, both visible and hidden. appropriate, eh?)