A Kid’s Birthday Party

Of all the kinds of birthday parties there are, a kid’s birthday party is often the most memorable. I think it has to do with the importance we attach to them. After all, many of them involve such critical milestones. There’s the first birthday, the fifth, the tenth, the sixteenth, and so on. Yet, sometimes what makes the kid’s birthday party memorable has nothing to do with that, and everything to do with a gift, and the event.

I took my daughter to the kid’s birthday party of some friends of ours; their son was turning six. Not a very memorable age at all. And, as it happened, it rained that day; a real downer for most party-going activities. In fact, we weren’t sure there’d even be a party. But, we had the gift, and my daughter really wanted to go. So, we went, and were glad of it. Not only had the bad weather dampened the neighborhood, but the spirits of most of the families; only a half dozen kids showed up.

Yet, the parents made the best of things, and tried to have a good time. One of the guests at this kid’s birthday party, was the father’s father; the little boy’s grandfather. His wife had recently passed away, and he was alone for the first time in about fifty years. It showed in his face, and in his choice of gifts. He got his grandson a pair of rubber galoshes! Clearly, he’d not been handling the gift buying for a long time.

Yet, when the boy saw the gift, and saw the card, and knew that his grandfather had gotten the gift himself; well, you’d have thought he was Cinderella getting the glass slipper from Prince Charming. Metaphorically speaking, of course. There was a huge puddle right out front, and the boy decided he was going to try out those galoshes right then and there. Slipping them on his feet, he raced down the driveway, jumped, and landed smack in the center of that puddle with a huge splash. He happily spent the next hour just wading and sloshing through that puddle. By the end, he was drenched head to toe, but he didn’t care one bit.

From the smile on his face, you’d thought his grandfather had given him his first car or something. Instead, he gave him an even greater gift – a simple childhood joy. And that, this is what a kid’s birthday party is all about.