Everything You Didn’t Know About Birthdays!
Have ever faced the pressure of trying to blow out all your candles in one go? For a lot of people, a good birthday wouldn’t be complete without a birthday cake and candles. But why do we do this?
The celebration of birthdays themselves can be traced back to the Ancient Egyptians who considered their pharaoh’s gods and treated their coronation day as a celebration of a birth of a god.
The Ancient Greeks later built upon this tradition by adding sweet cakes that were baked and offered to the goddess of the moon Artemis, they even lit “candles” on top of it so it would glow like the moon.
The first appearance of the Birthday cake tradition started sometime during the 1400s in Germany. Kinderfest was a celebration for the children, “kinder” being the German word for children.
In Germany, many parents were concerned about the risk that children were at a high risk of harm from evil spirits on their birthdays. On the morning of the child’s birthday, the parents would make a cake and place candles to represent the child’s age, adding one more to symbolize their upcoming year.
These candles were kept lit the entire day, representing the parents hopes that their child would live another year (hence the extra candle). At the end of the day the child would blow all of their candles out at once to send their prayers of good fortune up to God.
The “Happy Birthday Song” also has an equaling interesting beginning. The tune was created in 1893 by Patty and Mildred Hill, who called it “Good Morning.” The tune remained, but the words evolved to the ones we know today and were eventually published officially in 1924 by Robert H. Coleman.
Did you know singing Happy Birthday for commercial profit is illegal under copyright laws? The Hill sisters, after the initial popularity of the song, sued Robert Coleman over the reproduction of the song, and eventually won the rights, meaning that people using the Happy Birthday song in movies still had to pay royalties up until 2016, when a lawsuit was filed to make the song public domain.
Who would have thought
