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Christmas, Easter, Halloween, and birthdays are rituals invented by adults to evoke in their children the wonder of innocence. The images of the cute child were realized in these rituals, very often expressed in gift giving. Holidays and pilgrimages, once expressions of deep communal needs, became the quintessential festivals of wondrous innocence, while vacations and tourist sites increasingly were changed into children's times and places. This transformation coincided both with new attitudes toward the young and with the rise of consumerism. To make sense of these subtle and ambiguous changes, the present chapter reconsiders the traditional meanings of festival rites and why they have survived the revolutionary changes of modern capitalism.

The conclusion provides a broad retrospective on the arguments presented and defended throughout the book. In addition, it also offers avenues of future research on the topic of musical propaganda in early modern England. For example, it suggests the presence of musical propaganda campaigns presenting moral instruction to individuals during the Elizabethan era, especially thorough broadside ballads. It also suggests a propaganda campaign prosecuted through the musical Birthday and New Year’s Day odes for William and Mary during their reign.

This chapter is about commemorations as a central ritual of community in Puerto Rican Chicago. At wakes, for example, there were lively debates about what had been a life of success or a life of failure, and, hence, the experience of the community itself. There were also many celebrations of continuing lives, weddings, baby showers, and birthday parties. It examines how commemorations, the sharing and making of memories, influence the social dimensions of identity. Contests over identity, power, and recognition, mobilize memory, as both place and practice, to establish legitimacy and to affirm claims to belonging. Commemorations show that, even in death, there is social life and that, even as identity is a matter of becoming, so it is deeply historical.

This chapter analyzes Ted Hughes' Birthday Letters. Birthday Letters put a poet, now of the 1990s, in correspondence with his younger self and the younger Plath. The poems comment on, allude to, contradict, or compete with those of Plath. There is a certain amount of putting facts right, a settling of scores that relates to the two poets' marriage and to the intrusion of others' biographical speculation about that marriage. Most of the verse in Birthday Letters is technically free, but, like so much mainstream contemporary poetry, it likes to keep the pentameter in sight, and much of it functions at a very low pressure. Indeed, the majority of the book's poems can be read more or less like prose. If the trouble with poetry of the 1960s and 1970s is too much striving for intensity of effect, the problem here is too little. Furthermore, most of the poems' artifice, their particularly poetic features, can, with the exception of some heavy-handed symbolism, be more or less ignored.

This chapter analyzes Ted Hughes' Birthday Letters. Birthday Letters put a poet, now of the 1990s, in correspondence with his younger self and the younger Plath. The poems comment on, allude to, contradict, or compete with those of Plath. There is a certain amount of putting facts right, a settling of scores that relates to the two poets' marriage and to the intrusion of others' biographical speculation about that marriage. Most of the verse in Birthday Letters is technically free, but, like so much mainstream contemporary poetry, it likes to keep the pentameter in sight, and much of it functions at a very low pressure. Indeed, the majority of the book's poems can be read more or less like prose. If the trouble with poetry of the 1960s and 1970s is too much striving for intensity of effect, the problem here is too little. Furthermore, most of the poems' artifice, their particularly poetic features, can, with the exception of some heavy-handed symbolism, be more or less ignored.

This chapter describes Olga Rudge's final years. Olga remained lively and alert at her one hundredth birthday party on April 13, 1995, celebrated with a concert of works by Vivaldi, the Red Priest, and followed by a light supper. She lived for another year and died on March 15, 1996.

This chapter discusses certain events surrounding Kierkegaard's twenty-second birthday—most notably the occurrence of a “great earthquake,” a “frightful upheaval” which serves as a turning point in the young Kierkegaard's life. Here, Kierkegaard describes the earthquake in conjunction with the end of his childhood—or at any rate the period prior to which he had struck out his own path, independent from his father's will. The chapter also quotes from a few of Kierkegaard's stories which hint at the secret that lies at the heart of Kierkegaard's earth-shattering revelations, such as that of a story between David and Solomon. The secret here, as the chapter surmises, may be that for Kierkegaard the Great Earthquake was the revelation of his father's sensuality.

The focus is on two classic descriptions of birthdays occurring on the same day. That is, the probability that two people selected at random from 23 have the same birthday and a specific probability a person’s birthday matches a specific day.

This chapter examines quinceañera ritual that marks a girl's fifteenth birthday in Mexico and the role played by the time of la ilusión which begins with this ritual. It shows why the quinceañera has become such an important ritual in creating female identity in Mexican low-income neighborhoods. It suggests that the fiesta and the mass associated with the ritual embody a process of female self-becoming in which not only continuity, but also discontinuities take place.

In this chapter, Sanchez examines her role as director and devisor of ¡O Romeo!, a devised, musical play based on the life, work, and imagined death of Shakespeare created for Milagro’s annual Día de los Muertos celebration in 2014. Milagro, as the Pacific Northwest’s premiere Latinx culture and arts organization, was uniquely situated to do this work in Portland due to its longstanding role in both the Latinx and theatre communities. This chapter asks what it means to use a canonically Anglo figure such as Shakespeare in a Latinx cultural context. ¡O Romeo! honored Shakespeare’s artistic contributions while humanizing the artist as a father still mourning the death of his son, Hamnet. Facing his own mortality, Shakespeare is visited by several of his most memorable characters including the villainous Lady M and Richard III who plot to destroy his legacy. This chapter explores how Shakespeare is imagined and inspired by the history of Aztec culture, Spanish colonization, and the languages of Spanish and Nahuatl, to create the first literary celebration of Día de los Muertos in his imaginary final play entitled, The Mystical Story of Love and Reunion of Xochiquetzal, the Aztec Maiden, and the Spanish Conquistador Don Armando.

On April 28, 1976, Johnnie Niles celebrated his 75th birthday at the University of Kentucky's Agricultural Science Auditorium. He trilled out the familiar opening line of “Black Is The Color.” For the past 35 years, he had performed that song on stages across the world, a song that he had sung in public 5000 times. While Niles was entertaining the audience, thieves were searching for his unpublished manuscripts. Niles knew that the thieves must have known him very well, because they knew where he lived and where the manuscripts were kept. The mystifying theft of Niles's songs and poetry was never solved.

Trees played a major role in Thoreau’s life and work. He responded to them with his eye, his heart, his muse, his mind and his soul. He related to trees emotionally and understood them as a naturalist. They fed his creativity and deepened his thought. He wrote of them as if he could see the sap beneath their bark. In short, he spoke their language. He loved their beauty, wildness, patience and persistence. Trees suggested the “ancient rectitude” of nature.” Nothing stands up more free from blame than a pine tree.” Trees also emerge in his writings as special emblems and images of the divine. On his 200th birthday, Thoreau is still helping us see trees in new ways.

Both at the cultural and individual levels, growing older is something that is paradoxically both resisted and accepted as inevitable. Experience is a concept that should be fundamental in gerontology. This chapter seeks to make a clear distinction between experience of the ways of the world and the lived experience of growing older. There are several ways people interpret the ageing of their bodies and one of these is through ‘the mask of age’. The author discussed how the mirror and old photographs help to determine how people recognise and respond to signs of age and other personal characteristics. Birthdays are also central to the ways in which age is marked and celebrated. Another key element in theorising the experience of growing older is that of ‘life transformations’: ranging from bereavement to moving house to falling ill, this concept directly reflects the idea of life starting anew.

Often, the concept of being ‘very old’ is always linked to ‘frailty’. This association raises the issue of what constitutes the latter. All too often, the oldest generation are being looked after in the security of care homes: out of sight and out of mind. In this chapter, two detailed case studies of people living to a great age are presented. The first case study is based on the published diaries and biography of the celebrated writer, Frances Partridge. It is then followed by a case study drawn from the TOG project, and a diary detailing the twelve months leading up to a 100th birthday.

This chapter details the occasion of Isaac Mayer Wise’s seventieth birthday. By this time the quarrels within the camp of what he called American Judaism simmered down, and time, the ever-active healer, transformed the ‘great Cincinnati agitator’ into the grand old man of American Judaism. He was still equal to the labours he had undertaken, but was now entering the time of harvest. Year by year the Hebrew Union College brought Wise to the centre of the stage at a grand ceremony. Six years after the first such ceremony, the Plum Street temple resounded with one with which he was yet more intimately connected, and which marks his entry into a golden age — the celebration of his 70th birthday, on 5 April 1889.

Ovshinsky’s life and work was celebrated at an early ninetieth birthday party on September 2, 2012, a joyous event attended by some 300 guests and family members, where many speakers paid tribute to his achievements. He had, up to that point continued to work on his ambitious gigawatt solar energy project, and also took a number of adventurous trips with Rosa and other family members. But his health had been declining for some months earlier, and after the party it deteriorated rapidly. He suffered excruciating pain and was finally diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer. It was too late for anything but palliative care in hospice, and on October 17 he died, surrounded by family members. Mourned by many, Ovshinsky was buried beside Iris in the Akron Workmen’s Circle cemetery.

As Still approached 80, his name was becoming widely recognized as a writer and an Appalachian personality. This chapter explores the anomaly of James Still by comparing him to two of his creations, the joyful Uncle Jolly and mischievous Godey Spurlock. His 80^th birthday was a day-long celebration at Hindman Settlement School with 400 people attending. The day was declared James Still Day by the governor of Kentucky; the party was named A Master Time.

This chapter explores the significance of young Americans’ twenty-first birthdays from the 1830s to the 1880s, arguing that for youth of both sexes and a variety of backgrounds and political persuasions, turning twenty-one was a watershed moment. For young men, especially during an era of widespread political participation, turning twenty-one represented the achievement of adulthood, the moment when they were now eligible to cast a ballot. Young women, by contrast, acknowledged the significance of the age for their brothers and male friends, and some bitterly railed against the ways that sex kept them from enjoying suffrage. In an era when the age of first marriage was increasing, when finding a job and entering upon a career were fraught with uncertainty and often felt beyond the control of many, the absolute certainty of this unearned promotion from boy to man was of immense importance to young men who turned twenty-one. Relying on letters and diaries, and in contrast to scholars who have claimed that Americans did not value age until later in the nineteenth century, Jon Grinspan demonstrates that the age of twenty-one was of great significance to the young men and women who celebrated that birthday every year.

Mixing personal reflection and feminist theory, this chapter analyzes the broad significance of Mexican American rituals celebrating a young women’s passage into adulthood at fifteen—quinceañeras—and elderhood at fifty—cincuentañeras. Norma E. Cantú finds in these ritualized birthday celebrations a form of resistance through which Chicanas are able to occupy a transitional space, moving between life stages and cultures in ways that enable transformation. Cantú employs a Chicana Third Space Feminist approach, a mode of analysis that valorizes personal expressions developed in liminal spaces and transitory stages outside the mainstream of American culture. Through this lens, she recovers the long history of quinceañera celebrations as well as the more recent adoption of cincuentañeras. She also explains why celebrations of men’s fifteenth and fiftieth birthdays have become more popular in recent years. By analyzing how particular individuals adopt established rituals, Cantú shows how quinceañeras and cincuentañeras enable Mexican Americans to transform their self-understandings and place in their communities at age fifteen and fifty.

This chapter focuses on children's birthday parties that turn into hyper-playdates. While some regard birthday parties as a private celebration for family and intimate friends, it is possible for a family to deviate from what is expected within an entire group of parents and come up with an extravagant birthday party. Due to pressure to raise the stakes in what most would consider a modestly important occasion, parents might seek to impress others and ultimately establish a social circle of “people like us.” Building on the work of Alison J. Clarke, a social anthropologist who wrote about the negotiation of birthday parties in North London, this chapter examines how social reproduction is cultivated through the birthday party. It shows how participants' expenditure of money and decisions on what constitutes “good food” become part of social and class reproduction. It suggests that mothers want to perform for their “circle of friends,” regardless of the child's needs.