I am mainly writing this to entertain my fellow dermatology residents, but also to share some cultural knowledge that I think is a great idea.  The picture is of Jessica on the left feeding Tricia (the birthday girl) on the right a piece of birthday cake.  Jessica’s family has an interesting tradition. Her husband is Indian, and it is an Indian tradition for every birthday party, that everyone present gets to feed the birthday person a bite of cake and the last person to go gets to smear the cake on their face.  Now that sounds like a great birthday tradition to me, as if we need any excuse to eat a little more cake on our birthdays. Fortunately for Tricia, only Jessica felt obligated to feed her and did not smear her with cake.  Here is another interesting tidbit from Wikipedia about birthday candles.  Enjoy.

Though the exact origin and significance of the candle blowing ritual is unknown, the history of placing candles on top of the cake is well documented. This tradition can be traced to Kinderfest (Kinder is the German word for ‘children’), an 18^th century German birthday celebration for children. A letter written in 1799 by Goethe recounts: “…when it was time for dessert, the prince’s entire livery…carried a generous-size torte with colorful flaming candles – amounting to some fifty candles – that began to melt and threatened to burn down, instead of there being enough room for candles indicating upcoming years, as is the case with children’s festivities of this kind…”. As the excerpt indicates, the tradition at the time was to place candles for each of the individual’s life with some added candles ‘indicating upcoming years’. Candles, being slow-burning, are believed to be symbolic of the passage of time. In fact, they were often used as timekeepers. The origin of birthday cake candles can be further traced back to the 16^th century German tradition of placing tapers on Christmas trees.  This tradition was then brought to North America by German immigrants. By 1927, the Sears Roebuck catalogue offered birthday candles and holders for sale.

The Pace family attended their first Oktoberfest with the Villanuevas in Oak Park.  I have never been to this German festival before tonight.  The Oak Park version was more of a carnival than a traditional German festival.  The beer choices weren’t that impressive either.  Pretty standard American stuff except for St. Pauli Girl, which is pretty standard import.  However, the presence of the Villanuevas and some very fresh funnel cakes kept the night interesting.  The funnel cakes were so good and I assume sought after that there was a 3 funnel cake limit.  I did not see them enforce this, but I have a feeling it would have gotten pretty interesting if they had.  More pictures at http://www.akpacephotography.com.

Oktoberfest