World Citizen Wednesdays #39: Birthday Traditions

Welcome to World Citizen Wednesday!

Each week we pose a question to members of the fabulous Multicultural Kid Blogs group and share their answers here.

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Multicultural Kid Blogs is about to celebrate our First Anniversary, so this week we ask…

What are your family’s birthday traditions?

Natalie of Afterschool for Smarty Pants: Well, in our family we never celebrate early – it’s considered to be “bad luck”. On an actual birthday we start the day with birthday candlelight breakfast and presents. And we have a “birthday interview” for our daughter to ask her questions about the year that passed and the year ahead.

Varya of Creative World of Varya: I can’t say we do or don’t have traditions. We like throwing surprise tea parties for adults in our families. For kids, if we don’t have an actual party, we definitely have a cake and invite our closest friends over. My husband and I don’t really give each other presents but if we buy something special (e.g. a new laptop or a new phone), we do it in the name of an upcoming birthday (which may be months away!) or the one that just passed. I guess we are a bit more practical when it comes to our own gifts. For kids we usually have 2 presents – 1 before birthday, another one – on actual birthday.

Jennifer of The Good Long Road: We seem to be, inadvertently, starting a tradition of going to a baseball game for our youngest sons birthday. His birthday is in August, and we’ve done it for his only two birthdays, and the whole family loves it, so it might become a tradition!

Leanna of All Done Monkey: In my family my dad started the tradition of having cherry cheesecake for birthdays. The birthday kid even got his/her own cheesecake! I come from a big family, so having something just for yourself was a big treat. In my husband’s family, they always make arroz con pollo, plus there is the tradition of smashing the birthday person’s face into the cake!  We have started a tradition of adding to a special memory book for each of our kids.  On their first birthdays we create a time capsule for them to open when they turn fifteen.

Jody of Mud Hut Mama: We also do an interview with the birthday child and we always make a pinata and a chocolate cake – the icing color is the choice of whoever’s birthday it is but the cake itself has to be chocolate.

Annabelle of the piri-piri lexicon: We now have to have a crown as it apparently is a German tradition and our daughter adopted it straight away.  In my family as a kid, my dad used to bake us a swiss roll with homemade strawberry jam.

Heidi of 2 Kurious Kids: We always serve pancakes or waffles for breakfast with candles in them:)

Ute of expatsincebirth: We have a nice breakfast with candle for the birthday-kid/adult and I always bake a cake in the afternoon (and for the birthdayparty). Somehow I missed this part of German birthdays, we never used to have crowns… don’t tell my kids, please.

Jonathan of Dad’s the way I like it: When I was a kid, I used to get to open all my presents at breakfast before going to school. I’d then often have a party after school. My favourite sort of birthday cake growing up was gingerbread with marzipan icing.

Johana of Mama Tortuga: One donut with candle in the morning, of course a party with cake and birthday song!!!

Thanks to all the bloggers who shared their answers here! You can read answers to earlier questions in our previous installments of World Citizen Wednesday, including tips for traveling with kids!

Find out more about these wonderful bloggers by visiting our new Multicultural Kid Blogs website, liking us on Facebook, subscribing to our Facebook feed, following us on Twitter and Pinterest, or joining our Google+ community!