How We Do Birthdays

My brothers and I are all really close together when it comes to our birthdays. It's funny because our family (and now I mean extended family) does a really good job of clumping birthdays in groups, or at least always around a holiday where we get together anyway. Because it can be hard to get everyone together (and it's getting progressively harder as kids get older), we've gotten creative with our birthdays.

On our actual birthdays, we kind of get to make the rules. When we were kids, we didn't have to do school on any of our birthdays (though as I got older, I often still did school on my brothers' birthdays because they just played Lego and Nerf :) We always got to pick a place to go for dinner and we got to pick our own dessert. We could pick a movie to watch or games to play... pretty much whatever we wanted to do.

Because we always got lots of presents at Christmas and then again for our birthdays, our parents would get us one big thing. One year they took us to Zehnder's water park. Another year they got us a video game and lots of games. I don't remember for sure, but our Wii might have been a birthday present. It was always something big that we otherwise wouldn't get.

We only had one "traditional" birthday party, and even that wasn't completely traditional. I don't honestly know why we never did the "all the friends come over" birthday parties, but I never minded. Instead, we had our grandparents, aunt, uncle, cousins (as they were born), godparents, and one friend each all over to our house. Each kid got to pick a dessert of some kind and an ice cream and we had a little mini-party all on one day. It was always fun and I have fond memories of doing it that way. Yes, we "shared a birthday party", but we got our own days on our actual birthdays.

We are not the outlier in our extended family on this "group birthday" idea. We celebrate my aunt's birthday at Easter; two cousins' birthdays on Memorial Day; my grandpa's on Father's Day; my parents, uncle, and cousin on Labor day; my grandmothers we do together on a "random day" (no other holiday), but still they go together. It just works out well that we're already together for something and your birthday is at least close enough, so let's celebrate!!

How does your family do birthdays? Do you have any special or unique traditions?