Birth Date
A birthday is a day when a person celebrates the anniversary of his or her birth. Birthdays are celebrated in numerous cultures, often with a gift, party, or rite of passage. The celebration of a birthday usually is thought to mark how old a person is, traditionally stopping when death occurs and only stating that if still alive, they would have been (number of years) old. Some contemporary writers ignore this aspect, however, and keep counting the years since the date of birth of famous people, such as, proclaiming that it is Shakespeare's "four hundredth birthday" (although he died at the age of fifty-two) instead of noting that it is the four hundredth anniversary of his birth.
Although the major religions celebrate the birth of their founders (e.g., Buddha's Birthday), Christmas – which is celebrated widely by Christians and non-Christians alike – is the most prominent example. In contrast, certain religious groups, such as the Jehovah's Witnesses, choose not to celebrate birthdays.
Read more about Birth Date: Legal Conventions, Cultural Conventions, Birthday Traditions, Frequency, Time Zones and Birthdays, Leap Day
Famous quotes containing the words birth and/or date:
“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:”
—William Wordsworth (1770–1850)
“I date the end of the old republic and the birth of the empire to the invention, in the late thirties, of air conditioning. Before air conditioning, Washington was deserted from mid-June to September.... But after air conditioning and the Second World War arrived, more or less at the same time, Congress sits and sits while the presidents—or at least their staffs—never stop making mischief.”
—Gore Vidal (b. 1925)