Birthday Parties, You Know, For Kids

Young Master Fussy is having a party and the thought fills me with dread, but probably not for the usual reasons.

Some parents hate places like Chuck E. Cheese, but having grown up in video game arcades as a kid myself, this modern (if infantile) facsimile of one still feels like home. Other adults just go mad at the sound kids make when they are excited. That doesn’t bother me, although I’m not so crazy about the faces sticky with soda and the hands greasy from pizza. So as long as the kids don’t touch me, I’m fine.

Long ago I learned not to have the party at our house. And I’ve figured out a few strategies to keep expenses down at a more modest level than some juvenile soirees.

So why the dread?

Well, because when I was a kid, my mother was brilliant about putting together fun, well-themed, homemade parties for me and my sister. And I, for a lack of a better word, suck at it. Which isn’t entirely true, since I don’t even try. But let me give you a sense of what I would be competing with.

It should be noted that all of these parties happened before I turned seven, and I’m going entirely from memory, without the benefit of photographs. This is what a good kid’s birthday is capable of doing: provide a strong sense of parental love and devotion for the rest of your life.

But my mom had an unfair advantage. She was a gifted and well-trained professional elementary art educator.

The Wild West

Perhaps it was that Brady Bunch episode about Jesse James where he shoots all the Bradys on the train that traumatized me into wanting a gunslinger birthday. Actually, I think it was supposed to be a cowboy party since I had a fondness for Gene Autry at the time. For a young boy, somehow cowboys and gunslingers were inextricably linked.

Anyhow, in order to get their party bags filled with candy, my friends and I had to rob a bank.

For the party, the kitchen was transformed into the bank. There was a sign placed next to the kitchen door that listed the banks hours. And as it turned out, the bank closed just a few minutes before my guests arrived.

So with guns blazing, we held up my mom, who gave all her chocolate gold coins to us fierce bandits. Let’s hear it for the 70s, when gun play was just fine for kids six and under. 

Still, her ultimate accomplishment was…

The Viking Party

The boys got Viking shields. Each of these circles was cut in advance of the party by my mom, although at the time I was led to believe that I helped. Handles were attached. And my friends’ names were written in Viking on the sliver front.

The girls got transformed into Viking wives. They all received Scandinavian bonnets that included long, thick, blonde, braided pigtails, which my mother made out of yarn. Everyone seemed happy in their firmly constructed gender roles.

But the pièce de résistance that year was the Viking boat birthday cake. My mom actually made this herself, and it totally looked like a Viking boat. The hull was a layer cake trimmed in the shape of a ship. It was frosted in brown frosting. The oars were made from chocolate licorice. And Rolos in their gold foil wrappers were placed on their sides to make shields for the rowers on deck.

It was stunning, and delicious.

Young Master Fussy is getting none of that. In fact I’m tempted to buy him a supermarket cake. But Mrs. Fussy assures me that he will have some other positive memories from his childhood. I suppose we’ll only know what those will be many years in the future.

But I’m pulling for the donut tasting or the day with three lunches.