Sunday, February 27, 2011

"Happy Evil Visitation Day To Me ..."

My birthday is Tuesday, March 1st.

I thought I'd give you time to get me a present. I'm not getting any younger, you know? There's got to be some benefit to getting older. Checks are acceptable.

This year I decided to find out how birthdays got their start.

Turns out that birthdays were not always celebrated ... much less even counted. The ancients (they lived a long time ago) developed calendars after they noticed that the moon had cycles. Before then, everyone noticed that they got older ... they just didn't track it.

The first birthday parties started as protection. These ancient guys believed that a person was visited by evil spirits when they had a birthday. So to protect them from harm, they called up all their friends to have a party. The more good cheer ... the less opportunity for the bad stuff to happen. Noisemakers were used to scare the spirits away and candles were signals to the gods to send a "prayer" to be answered. Blow out the candles and make a wish? That was the way to send a signal and a message.

Here are some of the people I share March 1st  Evil Visitation Day with:

Catherine Bach, actress who played Daisy Duke
Ron Howard, Opie of Andy Griffith (and a few other things)
Roger Daltry of "The Who"
Harry Belafonte, "Day-O"
Pete Rozelle, NFL commish
Yitzhak Rabin, Israeli premier
Harry Caray, Cubs announcer
Dinah Shore, "See the USA in Your Chevrolet" (I just lost all my readers under 50)
Glenn Miller, Greatest bandleader of all time

So ... let's sing together:

Happy Evil Visitation Day To Me
Happy Evil Visitation Day To Me
Help Me On Tuesday ... Keep the Spirits Away!

2 comments:

Bobby Allan said...

You share your birthday with WAY better people than me. You know who shares mine?

OJ Simpson

Nuff said

joel said...

@ Chrissy ... I'm sure I left out a murderer or two who share my date.

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