In Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, the second part of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the character Humpty Dumpty asks Alice how many days there are in a year. She replies 365. Then he asks how many birthdays a person has. And the protagonist says one. And Humpty Dumpty triumphantly concludes that this allows for 364 days a year to celebrate unbirthdays, non-birthdays. From a satirical and literary perspective, the proposal might seem attractive. But it is of absurd logic because the fun lies in celebrating the exception and not the norm. Years later, from Disney's version of Alice in Wonderland, the Mad Hatter character sang A very merry unbirthday to you during the tea party. It was a way of telling us again that any occasion is good for a celebration without giving too much importance to the reason.
This approach has been reborn in a more commercial way. Two years ago, the Wall Street Journal warned of the popularization of having half-birthday parties: celebrating 18 and a half, 36 and a half, 49 and a half, or whatever one fancies. It's about having twice as many birthdays as we had until now. Six months after blowing out the candles and six months before doing it again, someone has invented that it's a good excuse to dedicate a half-tribute to oneself. Perhaps a little more modest than the big day, but in a way important enough not to seem like just any day.
Now (two years later and four half-birthdays later), The Guardian to commemorate the middle of the work week. The hump (From a sociological perspective, it can be interpreted as a demonstration of a certain void in life goals. Ordinary days become a kind of existential abyss, as if it were difficult to find meaning in them. On the other hand, this novelty of adding an unprecedented holiday to the calendar also seems conditioned by the obsession with exhibiting one's life and supposed happiness through social networks. If it's about that, any excuse is good: one can celebrate having paid off half the mortgage, having repaid half of a loan, or having lost half the kilos you set out to lose on a diet. Every celebration marks a transition, although in the case of the half-birthday, it's not entirely clear towards what. It's not the first time that Anglo-Saxon culture has tried to commercialize and popularize a celebration as absurd as the half-birthday. Years ago, it already christened Wednesday as "hump day" to commemorate the middle of the work week. The hump of the week is to remind us that from the third day onwards, everything goes downhill. Bars in office districts promote "hump day" discounts on drinks on Wednesday evenings.
The best way to combat this is to remember that we don't need any excuse to meet.
