“Happy Beddian to you” and other birthday oddities

 (Published in ENRICH magazine, 2022)

WILL YOU LIVE  to see your "Beddian Birthday"? Are you a "leapling"? Is it true early Christians regarded birthdays as "celebrations of evil”?

The answers to these puzzling birthday questions: Likely not if you're a Millennial (people born from 1981 to 1996). You’re a leapling, or a "leaper", if you were born on February 29 in a Leap Year. This also doesn’t mean your true age is a fourth of what it really is.

Sad, but the answer is true: early Christians refused to celebrate birthdays. They believed birthday celebrations were pagan rituals honoring the birth of pagan gods such as the Egyptian Pharaoh. This proscription against birthdays is in the Bible, as interpreted by some hardcore Christians even today.

There are two mentions of birthdays in the Christian Bible. One has to do with the birthday of the Pharaoh that imprisoned Joseph (Genesis 40:20-22); the other the birthday of the Jewish king, Herod the Great, where he promises to give the daughter of Herodias anything she wanted. She asked for the head of John the Baptist. Herod granted her wish (Mark 6:21-29).

It was only some four centuries after Christ's crucifixion the Church Fathers did an about face about birthdays. These ancient scholars decided that Christians thanking God for adding one more year to their scandalously short lives was a good thing worthy of praise.

Short is all too apt: the average life span of an Israelite male in Palestine during Christ's lifetime was a mere 29 years. On the other hand, a Jewish male in Israel today can expect to live up to 75 years. Christ was 33 when he was put to death on April 3, 33 AD, allege some biblical scholars.

The belief birthdays are pagan was also the reason early Christians didn't celebrate Christmas, otherwise known as Jesus Christ's "birthday". Christ was probably born in either September or October between 6 BC and 4 BC but not on December 25. His exact birth date remains unknown.

Happy birthday, birthday

It's hard to believe a mainstream ritual as innocuous as a birthday could have had such a complex and convoluted history among Christians. From pagan ritual shunned by Christians to a custom celebrated worldwide by many faiths is a huge leap indeed.

It’s surprising to discover that only the birthdays of pagan gods were celebrated in the ancient world. The prosaic custom we fondly call the birthday can be traced back to the ancient Egyptians tradition of hailing the coronation, or "god birth”, of their god descended to Earth -- the Pharaoh.

The Egyptians believed their all-too-human Pharaoh was transformed into a god once he ascended the throne of Egypt and they celebrated his deification or "birthday" accordingly. Pharaohs also held lavish feasts to mark this grand event. Individual birthday celebrations were unknown to the common Egyptian of the time, however.

Historians say the first birthday in history was recorded around 3,000 BCE. This birthday was likely that of Pharaoh Narmer (or Menes), who founded the first pharaonic dynasty that united both upper and lower Egypt.

The Egyptians developed two calendars: a lunar calendar based on the phases of the moon and a civil calendar for administrative and accounting tasks. The Egyptian lunar calendar was the first known calendar to use a year consisting of 365 days. It also had 12 lunar months and three seasons. By the way, this year (2022) is the year 6263 on the Egyptian calendar.

On to Hellas

The road that takes us to the birthday as we know it today then passes through ancient Greece, or Hellas, the homeland of the Hellenes or Greeks.

The Hellenes adopted the Egyptian tradition of celebrating the birthdays of gods, of which they had a vast pantheon residing atop Mount Olympus. The Greeks also had no personal birthdays.

Greece, a confederation of city states, had no single calendar. Instead, many city states had their own calendars that were different from the calendars of other communities.

The Hellenes added to our birthday traditions by introducing the birthday cake and candles. They lit candles at the temples or statues of their Olympian gods to drive away evil spirits such as the Keres (female death-spirits that feast on the dead) and Erebus (the personification of Darkness).

Celebrating the birthdays of their gods was a plea to the Olympians for protection against evil. Friends and family would gather around a statue of the birthday god and ask him or her to shield them from harm. Hellenes cheered loudly to call the attention of the deity. Gifts were placed at the god's temple as symbols of love.

It seems a favorite god of the Hellenic masses was Artemis, the Olympian goddess of the Moon, chastity, childbirth, wild animals, the hunt and vegetation. Considered the greatest Greek goddess by some, she was also hailed as the goddess of “Asia and the whole world”.

Hellenes offered moon-shaped cakes made from flour and lit by small candles as an obeisance to Artemis. By lighting candles on a moon cake, Greeks saw themselves sending prayers to Artemis, as well as recreating the bright glow of her Moon. Blowing out the candles was also another kind of prayer to Artemis.

Artemis' birthday was celebrated on May 6 along with her twin brother, Apollo, the god of the Sun and Light, music and dance, archery, truth and prophecy, and healing and poetry, among many other appellations.

Birthdays for the people

The Julian calendar established by Julius Caesar, the first Roman emperor, and adopted by the Roman Empire on January 1, 45 BC gave Roman citizens an excuse to celebrate individual birthdays. Some historians argue this is the first time in history a civilization celebrated the birth of beings who weren't gods.

Because human birthdays were acknowledged, a Roman man turning 50 years would receive a special cake made from honey, wheat flour and grated cheese. The patriarchal Romans didn't celebrate the birthdays of women, however.

One can conclude from this that some Romans did count the years of their lives from birth using the Julian calendar that had 365-1/4 days in a year. A Julian year was divided into 12 months and began a year on January 1.

Except for February, all the Julian months had either 30 or 31 days. February had 28 days in common years (or those with 365 days) and 29 every fourth year (or a leap year with 366 days). There was no February 29 in the Julian calendar.

The universal calendar

That individual birthdays are fairly universal today was made possible by the Gregorian calendar proclaimed on October 4, 1582 for Roman Catholics by Pope Gregory XIII.

The Gregorian calendar reformed and eventually replaced the Julian calendar. The main change in the Gregorian calendar was its different spacing for leap years. This change led to the average calendar year having a length of 365.2425 mean solar days. The Gregorian calendar continued to use the names of the 12 Julian months, however.

It brought the year closer to the 365.2422-day solar year brought about by the Earth's revolution around the Sun. The Gregorian calendar dropped 10 days from the Julian calendar to bring the vernal equinox from March 11 back to March 21. To accomplish this, the Papal Bull creating the Gregorian calendar declared the day after October 4, 1582 to be October 15.

The Gregorian calendar has become the most widely used civil calendar in the world. It is the calendar used in “ISO 8601:2004”, the international standard for representation of dates and times. ISO 8601 represents date and time and starts with the year, followed by the month, the day, the hour, the minutes, seconds and milliseconds.

Happy Beddian to you

Now, we come to a birthday oddity most of us never knew existed: the “Beddian birthday.” Yes, it isn’t fake news and yes, you can look it up in Wikipedia.

Your Beddian birthday occurs during the year that your age matches the last two digits of the year you were born. So, if you were born in 2022, you’re Beddian birthday would be 22 years-old. If you were born 2007, it would be seven years old. But if you were born in 2000, your Beddian birthday would be your 100th.

This longevity math doesn’t look good for most Millennials (1981 to 1996) and some of the guys that belong to Generation Z (1997 to 2012). If you’re a Filipino Millennial born in 1996, your Beddian birthday will be your 96th. And if you were born in 1981, you’d have to live to become 81 years-old to become Beddian.

As the average life span of the Pinoy male is currently only 67 years old, reaching 96 would be a huge win. Pinays can expect to hit 75 years-old on average, but getting to 96 is also a reach. It’s a lot tougher for Gen Zers born in 1999 and 2000, as you can see from the math. Living to be a hundred would be almost miraculous.

New anti-aging technologies being developed in the West promise to extend our lives past 150. Some longevity scientists even claim aging can now be reversed.

Called by some as the “Golden birthday,” the Beddian birthday is a once in a lifetime phenomenon for a minority of a population. The Beddian birthday is another reason to make merry but it hasn’t gone viral since it made its appearance in 2007. 

The Beddian birthday originated with the late Bobby Beddia, a New York firefighter. A story published by The New Yorker in 2007 recounted Beddia telling a visitor to his fire station about how lucky he was to have survived until his birth year.

Asked to explain by his puzzled visitor, Beddia said he was born in September 1953. To him, this meant his current age (53) was the same the final two digits of the year in which he was born. Sadly, Beddia was killed fighting a fire the very same day he gave that interview. The story about him carried the title, “The Firefighter’s Theorem.”

No birthdays for some

Surprisingly, celebrating a birthday isn't a universal event even today. A number of ethnic groups and some religions still don't count the years of the lives of their people.

Among these birthday abstainers are most Muslims because birthdays aren't part of the Islamic tradition. There are also the Hindus, who generally regard a person's death as more auspicious than his birth.

Jehovah's Witnesses, an American sect that rejects Jesus’ physical resurrection and denies the Christian Trinity, repudiates birthdays because they claim the only birthdays mentioned in their Bible are among men that didn’t worship Jehovah. The Witnesses are not Christians.