Our birthday presents should be things we give to our parents, not the opposite way!
For the first 18 years of my life, I used to think birthday is a day to celebrate how much I have grown or how long I've lived. Everyone congrats me with presents
When studying in UK and living alone, I was busy and and often missed my birthday.
Then when traveling, I stopped to care about date. I forgot my friends and my own birthday.
Talking in Vietnamese, I regularly need to ask for the age in order to know how to call people. But since I used English more often, I also forget about age. Everyone is ‘you’.
The more people I met, the more I'm sure that age is just a number. We are as young as we feel and "it's not the years in your life that count". So why we celebrate the increasing of a number ?
Why should we emphasize a number that doesn't mean how wise, how healthy or how long we will live?
Celebrate a birthday with the focus on our age is just meaningless, isn't it?
So should we forget our birthday?
I don't think so. This is the day we 1st met the world. Thank to our parents, or at least our mom.
For whatever they way your mom treats you, and even if she didn't raise you, she did keep you in her body for all those months. That's already a huge effort. So thank to her (and properly your dad too), you are here in this world. The journey from a piece of DNA to you, in a human form now, is already a difficult journey with the help of your mom. So that day, when your mom finished her 1st “duty” with you, should be remembered.
Let’s say thank you for our parents for giving us this live, despite whatever they did after that.