It's a lovely sunny Sunday. The sun is streaming in through the windows and the world is slowly getting up. Looking out through the front window, I am arrested by a new phenomenon: a large, purple, plastic, blow-up 2 in the neighbour's window opposite. Above it hang a cluster of coloured balloons. Easy to deduce the reason: the little girl that lives over the road is celebrating her second birthday and will be expecting a day filled with excitement, presents, visits from family and friends and cake!
Used to feeling like a 'newcomer' in the country because of my 'expat' status in the Netherlands, I am surprised to be faced with the realisation that we are in fact quite old-timers! Over the few years we have lived here we have watched houses go up for sale, neighbours come and go. The neighbours in question, over the road from us, came here quite some time after we moved in ourselves. Since then we watched them move their furniture in, we saw them decorate their house and plant flowers outside their front door and we viewed the development of a large bump which in turn became the little girl that now entertains us from a distance with her antics. We saw the large orange stork go up on the front window (a Dutch custom for newborns). A year later, a large 1 appeared in the window, and now it is her second birthday!
Today, by coincidence I am attending another birthday party! Kathy is a little older than my friend over the road, in fact she is enjoying, like me, the middle years of her life in exuberant fashion. Kathy is full of life and a colourful person. She loves food, flowers and stories. Apparently she also loves soup! We have been invited for a 'soup and stories' party. We've been instructed to bring offerings of homemade soup or a story or poem, but no presents... Well, we'll see about that!
For Kathy, cake is important. She is a real 'foodie' with excellent taste in such things! Of course there will be cake! No birthday party could be complete without the cake. I still remember the importance of cake in my own daughter's yearly celebrations and the agonising that went on the day before the party to produce some butter-icing-covered miracle to delight the children who had been invited. Boats with funnels, bunnies in bed, fairy-tale castles topped with ice-cream cone turrets, Sylvanian houses for woodland creatures, Rupert, 'best dog in the world!' and many more lovingly designed masterpieces were churned out for the occasion. The most ambitious was probably a model of the Isle of Wight in green icing (because we had just moved from her childhood home on the island), complete with island attractions, including the St. Catherine's lighthouse (named after our daughter!) and the dinosaur park, with a blue coconut-frosted sea with little jam tart boats with white sails. That was a birthday to remember!
My own best childhood birthday party memory was in fact a friend's party where I spent the entire time shunning all the games and even the birthday tea in order to cradle a tiny kitten in my arms. My best party frock had claw marks down one shoulder ever after to prove it. Olwyn's cat had recently produced an entrancing litter of gorgeous kittens and I had fallen in love with a tiny little black and white one with a black head and white striped nose. I wanted, of course, more than anything, to take it home. On this occasion my wildest dreams turned to ecstatic joy when my mother was bamboozled into finally agreeing to come back and take possession of this wonderful scrap of warm furriness in a few weeks' time when it was weaned. Badger, as he became known, turned out to be the most delightful feline character imaginable and kept our whole family entertained and at his beck and call for many a year to come.
But parties are all the same, it seems, no matter how old you are. We all love to have that yearly affirmation that we are loved, not forgotten and still the centre of attention at least once in the year! Balloons, gifts and even cake are just the trappings. We all want to feel special.
Used to feeling like a 'newcomer' in the country because of my 'expat' status in the Netherlands, I am surprised to be faced with the realisation that we are in fact quite old-timers! Over the few years we have lived here we have watched houses go up for sale, neighbours come and go. The neighbours in question, over the road from us, came here quite some time after we moved in ourselves. Since then we watched them move their furniture in, we saw them decorate their house and plant flowers outside their front door and we viewed the development of a large bump which in turn became the little girl that now entertains us from a distance with her antics. We saw the large orange stork go up on the front window (a Dutch custom for newborns). A year later, a large 1 appeared in the window, and now it is her second birthday!
Today, by coincidence I am attending another birthday party! Kathy is a little older than my friend over the road, in fact she is enjoying, like me, the middle years of her life in exuberant fashion. Kathy is full of life and a colourful person. She loves food, flowers and stories. Apparently she also loves soup! We have been invited for a 'soup and stories' party. We've been instructed to bring offerings of homemade soup or a story or poem, but no presents... Well, we'll see about that!
For Kathy, cake is important. She is a real 'foodie' with excellent taste in such things! Of course there will be cake! No birthday party could be complete without the cake. I still remember the importance of cake in my own daughter's yearly celebrations and the agonising that went on the day before the party to produce some butter-icing-covered miracle to delight the children who had been invited. Boats with funnels, bunnies in bed, fairy-tale castles topped with ice-cream cone turrets, Sylvanian houses for woodland creatures, Rupert, 'best dog in the world!' and many more lovingly designed masterpieces were churned out for the occasion. The most ambitious was probably a model of the Isle of Wight in green icing (because we had just moved from her childhood home on the island), complete with island attractions, including the St. Catherine's lighthouse (named after our daughter!) and the dinosaur park, with a blue coconut-frosted sea with little jam tart boats with white sails. That was a birthday to remember!
My own best childhood birthday party memory was in fact a friend's party where I spent the entire time shunning all the games and even the birthday tea in order to cradle a tiny kitten in my arms. My best party frock had claw marks down one shoulder ever after to prove it. Olwyn's cat had recently produced an entrancing litter of gorgeous kittens and I had fallen in love with a tiny little black and white one with a black head and white striped nose. I wanted, of course, more than anything, to take it home. On this occasion my wildest dreams turned to ecstatic joy when my mother was bamboozled into finally agreeing to come back and take possession of this wonderful scrap of warm furriness in a few weeks' time when it was weaned. Badger, as he became known, turned out to be the most delightful feline character imaginable and kept our whole family entertained and at his beck and call for many a year to come.
But parties are all the same, it seems, no matter how old you are. We all love to have that yearly affirmation that we are loved, not forgotten and still the centre of attention at least once in the year! Balloons, gifts and even cake are just the trappings. We all want to feel special.
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