Birthday Greetings

Illustration of birthday cake on a silver tray with eight lit candles on a blue background with white text.

Celebrating a birthday with cake and lit candles is a practice that has evolved over hundreds of years drawing from many cultures. In Ancient Greece, there was a tradition of making moon-shaped cakes to bring to the temple of Artemis, goddess of the moon. The cakes had lit candles decorating them, meant to make them shine like the moon. In Roman times, cakes were made to celebrate some citizens’ 50th birthdays, although this was reserved for men of high social status. By the 18th century, Germans had a tradition of celebrating birthdays for children called “Kinderfeste,” in which a cake would be topped with candles in the morning and kept lit all day until the cake was eaten after dinner. It was not until the industrial revolution, however, that birthday cakes became a trend in the United States when ingredients, baking tools, and even pre-made cakes cost less and were more accessible to the population.