birthdays....

lesabre

hi!! tomorrow is my birthday! :) i've "been out" for 5 years, and my inlaws have thrown me b-day parties for all 5 of those years. when i was a kid, my mom always said she didn't really think anything wrong with making your birthday a special day. (we would go to my great gramma's b-day parties cause "she was too old to understand why we wouldn't go" my mom said. lol) SO my mom would always call my older non-jw siblings on their b-day and let us younger JW ones do something to make us feel special on our b-days. it was always un-spoken that that was why we got to have a special day. but we knew. my mom was babtised when i was 2 and my dad got babtized when i was 4, so there were a lot of little things that my parents let us get away with (watching smurfs, reading scary books, using my brain, etc.. they knew nothing BAD was going to happen) so i don't exactly know how it is to have born-in parents.....

so.... what did you guys do for your b-days as a JW? or did it go un-noticed by your parents?

Mythbuster

mrsjones5

When I was a kid my parents made a point of not doing anything for our birthdays but when we became teenagers my mother would buy us a plain cake of our favorite flavor from a bakery. When we became adults my mother would call us on our birthdays before the time of our births to remind us that we were not yet whatever age we were to be and that she didn't celebrate birthdays.

mentallyfree31

My family got baptized when I was six. From that point forward birthdays were non-existent. Nothing.

-mentallyfree31-

finallysomepride

Happy Birthday

finallysomepride

I am a born in, never celebrated birthdays until I left, now celebrate my childrens birthday, my sons was last week he is now 18.

Broken Promises

Birthdays were a non-event. However, once a year, I would receive a special present which was called a “yearly present”. It would be a larger, possibly more expensive, present compared to what I’d get during the year. It was obviously my parents’ way of compromising. It more or less stopped as I got older, around the age of 12 or so.

undercover

Growing up as a JW...nothing B-day related. Not even an acknowledgment of another year.

Having grown up without it, it's not something I missed though. Hard to miss something you never had. I did notice that other kids got gifts and parties but I was so detached from "worldly" kids that I didn't really envy them.

And we never had "special days" or "special gifts". It saved my dad quite a bit of money over the years, I'm sure...

The one b-day I was excited about was my 16th so I could get my drivers's license...yet my parents made me wait a couple of weeks, just so it didn't look as though "allowing" me to get my license could be construed as a b-day gift or celebration.

yknot

Raised pretty Uber regarding birthdays and holidays......(except we went all out to buy fireworks----but shot them off during the summer)

Smurf stuff was burned........

My worldy dad tried to do B-days but I was too indoctrinated............

no more kool aid

My parents were born in, so birthdays are and always were a non event. Same for my husband and his family. My poor kids didn't exactly get great grand parents. We are trying to make it up to them! NMKA

birthdays....

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