Once upon a year, we are graced with a plump and hopefully moist cake. This cake is simply a mixture of flour, eggs, sugar, butter, water, vegetable oil, and maybe even some secret ingredients. IT is put into an oven, heated, and usually very ugly by the time it comes out, all brown and split from the center. It is definitely not as beautiful as when you bake a pie, when it pops out of the oven all decorated with crust and ready to eat, never having to cool.

First, someone is given the burden of making you a cake. Once this person has preheated the oven, cooked it, and taken it out, it is placed onto a cooling rack. IT sits and absorbs all the bacteria living in the air surrounding it. The cake cools over time while the person who baked it enjoys an hour-and-a-half Lifetime movie session. They dry their tear filled eyes with their box of Kleenex, and wash their hands under some warm water with some fruity scented soap. Then with a knife, they begin to smother your cake with a mixture of sugar-filled frosting goop, food coloring, and artificial flavoring. What a treat. Mmm, the fat. Ouch, the stomach aches after eating it!

Atop this very cake is the name your parents gave you. It is there for the world to see. The name you were given when you were much too young to think for yourself. Anything other than your childhood favorites are difficult to think of that young. Memories like the usual milk you always craved or the chocolate that the elementary “older” kids would wave in front of your face and devour without an ounce of sympathy in their bodies. That delicious milk chocolate that you couldn’t have even eaten considering you didn’t have a single tooth to chew with just yet.

Your cake also reads a number. That number appears as big as a hippo once you reach the double digits. Not only does it say your age once, but they show your age a second time by sticking “that lucky number” of little wax sticks that drip onto your beloved concoction, straight into your cake. These little wax sticks gouge little craters into the lovely decorated cake, all while being lit on fire. Sitting on your cake now, are little flames that smell like smoke and dr4oplets of wax that don’t necessarily befriend the frosting.

Then, to top it all off, people begin to sing to you. IT seems as though every person in the room needs singing lessons. Even though, you know that if you were singing to yourself you would sound just as bad, if not worse. Squeaky little children fill the room with their out of tune pitches as they try to remember all six words in the entire song:

1. Happy

2. Birthday

3. To

4. You

5. Dear

6. Your Name