Party time!

It’s birthday time! No, not for me. At least not yet. I can still carry on with adding things to my wish list for months (oh, if you know me well enough, you would know that I actually don’t do lists, but it just sounded as an appropriate thing to say). At the moment we’re getting organised for the birthday of our youngest member of the family who’s big day is still way ahead in August, but as it’s the last week of school it’s really the only time when he and his best mates are all around.

I can’t remember celebrating my birthday when I was that young but I guess it happens when you start school (in the UK at the age of four) or maybe even earlier than that in the nursery and then you are more likely to have proper friends, just because you’re stuck with the same kids for days without your own choice, so you either make friends or enemies… But as I didn’t start school before I was six and neither did I attend a kindergarten before that, I didn’t have these, as I called them earlier - proper friends. My best pals were my brothers and kids on the streets, either neighbouring ones or the children living further afield (oh, I was quite an adventurer, playing in the streets that we weren’t even living!). 

As soon as I had to organise a party for my own kids here in the UK, I had to learn how to do it from the scratch. Yes, we do have some things in common, like the birthday cake and the party games, but not the same kind of cake (it might be nowadays though) and not all the same kind of games either. There are games that have same/similar rules, but their names are different, for example Chinese whispers is called in Estonia - telefonimäng (telephone game), Musical statues is basically like keerukuju - Twirling statues (just instead of dancing you have to twirl around until you’ve told to stop). What’s the time, Mr Wolf? has elements of the game Silgud ritta, üks, kaks, kolm (Line up herrings, one, two, three!), but Pass the parcel was new to me and also the fact that you have to give an award to the winner at the end of every game. When I was little we used to play these just because it was fun and weren’t competitive because of the packet of sweets. 

We had plenty to eat at the party, because also as another difference, we always ate our birthday cake at the table, not later at home after unwrapping the slice from the napkin, which was added to our goody bag at the end of the party. I guess it would have been a bit foolish to pack a really soft divinity cake into a paper serviette (if you haven’t had this cake before, it basically looks and feels like a cake covered in lots of shaving foam, but instead of getting your razor blade out to start shaving, you may actually eat it and it’s rather nice). The second cake option at my parties was a massive cake covered in thick butter cream made by my great aunt and if I remember correctly, because as it WAS so big, quite often we DID cut a slice for every guest to take home as well, after they’d had at least one piece at the party of course.

And when talking about food, Estonians lay quite different edibles on the table. It has changed over the years but when I was little my party food never consisted of sandwiches, cocktail sausages, crisps, cucumber and carrot sticks with dips, sausage rolls, biscuits like Jammy Dodgers and Party Rings. To be honest, I didn’t even know some of these things existed. In Estonia it is common to have bowls full of potato salad and obviously (black) rye bread to accompany almost any kind of food, additionally you could have pickled pumpkin salad and pickled/salted gherkins and… Sorry, can’t continue anymore as it makes me hungry and miss Estonian food.

But additionally on the same birthday note - what’s this thing here with leaving a few balloons at the door to let the guests know where the party is held? Why isn’t the house/flat number enough? Do people get forgetful or/and confused when there’s a party to attend?