This post first appeared on February 28, 2018.
Birthday cakes boast a long, illustrious history. According to the Huffington Post, Greeks and Romans commemorated births of gods and men with candlelit cakes. As wine flowed at birthday feasts, the honoree occasionally set his toga on fire.
Birthday cake traditions still are regarded as sacred. Abstainers offend the family/office/church Cake Queen. (Watch your back, or she may stuff you into her oven.)
So, for survival reasons, I eat birthday cake. Thankfully, lighted candles suck out all calories.
On my upcoming birthday, however, I will indulge in raspberry pie. À la mode? Of course, à la mode. Do you think I’m an idiot?
Don’t answer that. You, either, Hubby.
Obviously, this crucial subject demands discussion. Though my sweet tooth welcomes sugar, regardless of origin or creed, I have always liked pie best, especially my mother’s — fruit-plump, with ambrosial juices bubbling through golden, flaky crusts.
As a child, I loved reading about pie. Almanzo Wilder, in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Farmer Boy, reverently scanned hundreds at a county fair: “When he began to eat pie, he wished he had eaten nothing else.”
Mom would have made me birthday pies, if I’d dared requested them. But tradition ruled. I blew candles out on cakes.
Pie Heaven does exist on this earth. My brother practiced optometry where Amish patients gifted him with luscious offerings. Amazingly, he once shared his birthday shoofly pie with me … which made me suspicious. Had he stuck bananas up my Ford’s tailpipe? Informed the IRS I never had the three children I claimed? Volunteered me for a ten-year mission in the Sahara? I still wonder. …
Some opponents caution that deviating from the cake custom opens the door to chaos. Only at one’s wedding does one deal with cake-in-the-face. But birthday pie increases pie-in-the-face risks exponentially.
And their point is?
The lemon cream pie that once smeared my visage caused no dire effects. Fellow conference-goers, however, fussed about my suit and hair as if I’d suffered a blast of radiation.
When globs of luscious pie are within licking distance, who cares about my hair? Some people should get their priorities straight.
Did you hear that, Almanzo? I know you’d bravely take a pie in the face. And choose birthday pie, too.
Your Extraordinary Ordinary: Which would you choose, birthday pie or cake? Which kind?