Too Many Candles?

I recently celebrated yet another birthday (thank you, God) and had a lovely day with my lovely wife.

Coming as it always does with the dark approach of Winter, the kinds of things we could do were limited. No swimming, or kayaking, or boating on my Winter birthday as long as I keep living in a high-altitude, high-latitude state with frozen lakes and rivers in December.

With snow on the ground, no mountain hikes. And with temps usually in the low-40s or colder, no biking (yes, I AM a wimp, especially if the wind is blowing). And I'm not really a skier or ice skater.

Essentially, no outdoor-type stuff except walking the doggie. So it was a pretty typical retiree's December weekday birthday: a nice, uncrowded lunch and an uncrowded afternoon movie.

Really not so bad.

And there was CAKE — a mouth-watering dark chocolate cake infused with cherries and generously slathered with white buttercream frosting -- handmade by my sweet wife.

Delicious. Diet-busting -- but delicious.

It got me to thinking: How many birthday cakes have I enjoyed over the past decades? I don’t recall having a cake on EVERY birthday — but quite often. And from where did this cultural habit arise?

Well, you may be interested to know that having cake for one’s birthday is a very old tradition that some believe may have started in Germany sometime in the Middle Ages.

Those early Germans baked birthday cakes for their children and called it Kinderfest. Somewhere along the line, people began putting candles on birthday cakes to make them more festive and started the tradition of blowing out said candles to make the event even more…uh, happy???

Anyway, the tradition of a birthday cake festooned with candles — often with the number of candles matching the number of birthdays celebrated — has been a part of Western World culture for hundreds of years.

Just in case you were wondering: My cake didn’t have any candles on it, for a very good reason.

There wouldn’t have been enough cake to hold them all.

Only one thing to do: Get a bigger cake.