I love birthdays. And I don’t just mean my birthday or love them for the presents. To me it’s not about celebrating another year, it’s celebrating the fact a person was born. That the world is a richer place for having them in it. Choosing presents for friends and family can be a fun part of birthdays, as well as receiving them, but it’s not all that it’s about for me.

I’ve always been enthusiastic about them. Even as a child. As I grew older, friends and family kept telling me I’d eventually grow out of it. Well, it appears that they will be waiting a long time for that to happen as I still look forward to each and every birthday.

This year, my oldest son made me a chocolate choc-chip cake. After all, cake and birthdays go hand in hand and I absolutely love cake. You can also never have enough chocolate so that is one of my favourite types of cake. Now on my birthday, I don’t work. Or at least, I don’t do anything that isn’t fun and enjoyable. So my kids spend the day running around after me for a change and I laze about and read, watch movies, play games and eat cake. I also sometimes scribble a handful of words if the next line of one of the stories I’m working on comes to mind. But I don’t actually sit down and plan to do any writing.

Surprisingly, considering I only spent a few minutes here and there adding another line or two in the story I’ve been working on recently, as it came to me, I wrote one thousand four hundred and twenty-three words. It didn’t seem anywhere like that many words when I was doing them since I was only spending a few minutes at a time on it. Which just goes to show that you don’t need large amounts of time to write. Just little bits and pieces of time here and there.

We have a few traditions when it comes to celebrating birthdays. The person who is having the birthday chooses what happens for the day. They decide what food is cooked and someone else does the cooking. There is also cake and candles and the birthday song, which is sung very badly because there are few of us who can actually sing and we tend to be a little out of sync with each other. Or at lot at some times. But most of all, it’s about having fun and enjoying the day we came into this world however many years ago that might have been.

I’d love to hear how all of you celebrate your birthdays. Post a comment or email me. I truly love to hear about the various ways people spend the day and what they think about the day on which they arrived in this world.