A child’s First Birthday is a momentous celebration and is celebrated with great pomp and fare by the parents. Family members on both the mother’s and father’s sides are invited, as well as dear friends, and everyone gets together to show their love for the child who has completed one year of life most successfully. The venue for such a party can vary, sometimes being catered in the home if it can accommodate the extensive list of guests, or other times, it is organized wholly by party planners who throw in everything they can to make sure that a child’s First Birthday creates lifelong memories for all those who attend.
Speaking of inviting people, please be sure to take a look at the First Birthday Inytes that we have at Inytes.com. Their appealing vivacious designs mask their true effectiveness as a key organizing tool when it comes to your child’s First Birthday. Allowing you to track RSVP’s and to attach a map that allows Inytees to find the venue for the celebration with the utmost ease, you will be able to turn your attention to more pertinent matters relating to your infant daughter’s or son’s First Birthday celebrations. Now that we have gotten the nitty-gritty out of the way, we thought we would take a brief look at how different cultures around the world celebrate First Birthdays.
First Birthdays in India
A lot of us have probably heard about the time we cried when we had our heads shaved around the time we turned one year old. For those of you who were born when cameras were more accessible to everyday users like your parents, you have probably been presented with evidence of your reaction as well. However, how many of you know why you had your head shaved at such a time? You may have been told that it was because doing so ensured a more robust growth of hair as you grew up. Not many people will tell you about the underlying belief that imagines that a baby’s hair is connection to negative things from her or his past life.
Interestingly, India is not the only country where a baby’s head is shaved around the one-year mark. People in Turkmenistan observe this practice as well, with the oldest brother of the child’s mother having to ritualistically complete the shaving of the child’s head.
First Birthdays in Japan
In some parts of Japan, a large mochi rice cake is prepared and strapped to the one-year old’s back, after which the baby is asked to walk as many steps as it can. If you are imagining a small, adult-fist-sized dumpling strapped to a baby’s back, think again. Think more like almost two and a half kilograms of mochi cake! For a child? Yeah, that’s quite the feat. Apparently, this weight on the baby’s back is symbolic of all the things that will have to be endured in life, but which will have to be overcome in due course of living.
First Birthdays in Nigeria
Nigerian First Birthday celebrations are all about the feast, and inviting everyone to come and partake in it until they are unable to walk back home, or to their cars to try and get back home. It is believed that a whole roasted cow features quite a bit more often than anyone of us may imagine it being the case, just to give you an idea of the magnitude of the proportions of the feasts.
First Birthdays in China and Korea
Among some families in China and Korea, a certain ritual of having the baby symbolically pick her or his future is still practiced. Nowadays, it may be carried out more for the sake of the amusement of all the well-wishers present, but there was a time when this ritual held a lot more weight. What happens is, a mat or piece of cloth is laid out in front of the baby, on which there are objects that symbolize different kinds of jobs, or fields of interest, such as a pen for someone who may grow up to be a writer, or a ball, which indicates a future in sports, or perhaps even a stethoscope, a rather obvious symbolic reference. Once these have been placed in front of the baby, the baby is allowed to go and pick up the one that intrigues her or him the most.
So, these are some of the ways in which First Birthdays are celebrated or observed around the world. We hope you have enjoyed this glimpse into the ways in which different cultures mark the first year after the birth of a child. If you happen to know of any more examples like these, please do let us know by commenting, or sharing with us on our Inytes.com social media profiles. Thank you.
It has been a quiet year and a little bit because of the effects of the global Covid-19 pandemic, but we assure you that people have been celebrating birthdays around the world. On that note, we thought we would take a glimpse at the trends that are popular when it comes to celebrating a child’s First Birthday. We looked at how different cultures around the world celebrate First Birthdays in another blog post [LINK TO BLOG ARTICLE – ABOUT EVENT], but in this post, we will look at more contemporary First Birthday celebration trends.
First Birthday Ball Pit
All this idea needs is a small kiddie pool and baby-safe plastic balls, and you have all the ingredients for a ball pit for your child’s first birthday. It is more than likely that there will be other babies at this First Birthday party, so let them all have fun in the kiddie pool and you, and the other parents can capture these moments to become part of a growing collection of memories from this time in your daughter’s or son’s life.
First Birthday Painted Footprints
One of the first caveats about this activity is that if you can, try and do it outside of your house. If not, and you happen to be a brave soul not fearing an almighty clean up afterwards, then using baby-safe, washable paint, apply the color or colors of your choice to the soles of your daughter’s or son’s feet, and have them walk across large sheet of paper. If you want to, you can even color their hands and have them walk and crawl across the paper, saving it as a memento in the scrapbook that you will so diligently maintain for the rest of your life, labelling it with the date, time and place, just so you never forget when and where.
First Birthday Autographed Onesie
Here is an activity more for the adults who will attend your baby’s First Birthday party, getting them to sign a onesie, or better yet, exercise some artistic flair and paint their names, or a small design on it. If you can organize this beforehand, so that the paint or ink dries and is not a threat to your baby’s health, then one the day of the birthday, you can have your daughter or son wear it and take pictures individually with all those who autographed the onesie. This way, you can have these pictures as part of your collection of fondest memories, and you can share these with those family members and friends who participated as well.
First Birthday Smash Cake
First up, you will need extra cake for this. Now that we have cleared that up, the basic premise of this photo and video opportunity is placing a sheet cake in front of your baby daughter or son, and allowing them to consume it or more likely, play with it as their heart so desires. Let them have at it, scrunching it up between their tiny fingers, or tearing it into pieces as if exercising a considerable amount of power to utterly destroy the cake. There is no nice way to put this, but the main casualty of this activity is the cake. On the plus side however, you will have a stream of photos or several video clips that you can knit together to create a beautiful memory you can play back as many times as you like.
These are just some of the First Birthday celebration trends that are out there, but there are obviously many more. So, please do let us know if you think there are some kinds of celebrations or First Birthday party activities that we should try out. And, before we go, we urge you to check out our First Birthday Inytes on Inytes.com. If you or someone you know has their baby’s first birthday coming up, be sure to choose one from our selection of First Birthday Inytes to send to your family and friends to let them know where the party is happening. Make it a day to remember forever.
