Interesting Facts

If you're a resident of North Korea, and your birthday happens to fall on July 8th or December 17th, guess what? You're sh#t outta luck. Said dates are strictly reserved for lamenting Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il, who (respectively) kicked the bucket on those days. 100,000 North Koreans therefore celebrate "displaced" (see: ghost) birthdays every year, but not until they've spent their actual womb-debut anniversary "patriotically" weeping, wailing, and gnashing their teeth. There is a way around the problem, though. If you want to, you can go ahead and change your birthday so there's no conflict of interest via an "official provision."

In certain parts of Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland, it's customary to grease a birthday-child's nose with butter or margarine, so they'll be too slippery for bad luck to catch hold of. It's a clever concept, and perhaps a precautionary measure that every non-greased birthday reveler ought to consider adopting.

In Vietnam, there's only one birthday, and everybody celebrates it on the same day. Tet, AKA the Vietnamese New Year, is intended to herald the coming of spring, but it's also the day when every man, woman, and child alike puts on party hats and blows out the candles on a collective cake. Not a bad way to consolidate astrological signs, all things considered. (While more and more Vietnamese are adopting the Western idea of age in modern times, most adhere to the uniform aging policy).

In certain parts of Russia, birthdays aren't just about gifts. Sometimes, they're about objects you already own being wrapped up (by ghosts) and presented to you as new offerings. It's customary for Russian spirits to confiscate the possessions of misbehaving children or family members, but if the person is good all year long, the possibility those possessions will be returned to them on the week of their birthday increases. The fun is therefore all in the mystery: the child has to guess which brightly wrapped packages contain new toys, and which contain old toys recently in the possession of malevolent spirits.

The trope of the sinister birthday clown is a common one, but one particularly enterprising visionary in Lucerne is well on his way to establishing a new tradition: the stalking Bozo. The clown's ominous presence is designed to generate the kind of built-up excitement generally only associated with the final countdown to Christmas morning. For a fee, Dominic Deville will pseudo-terrorize your child (in the form of "menacing" phone calls, texts, and letters) for the week leading up to their birthday. Then, on the day itself, he'll show up in person and smash a cake into their face. Don't worry: as macabre as it sounds on paper, it's all in good fun, more in the spirit of a good-natured Halloween prank. And parents can always call it off if their kid gets too freaked out, but apparently most kids "love it" according to Deville.