Laer's Birthday Cake

Laer attempting to blow out the candles on his cake.

In Canada and some other countries around the world it is customary to blow out all the candles on your cake. The number of candles coincide with the number of years you have been around and you only get one breath to extinguish them all. If successful you get a birthday wish granted. A Lego train set, peace on earth, a new Nikon lens, sex with two members of the opposite sex (at the same time of course and on a regular basis), whatever it's up to you.

Generally, a birthday wish is done just before attempting to blow out the candles. That said it then seems that you're most likely to get your birthday wish, blow out your candles, in your teens. A) there aren't as many candles to blow out, B) you have better coordination than when you're one or two.

Chances are when you were one or two you really didn't know what you wanted anyway. You just wanted someone to change your diaper on a regular basis and maybe feed you, maybe both. Also at that ripe young age you probably had the help of your parent blowing out your candles for you thus negating your diaper wish. At that age the birthday was proably more for the parents anyway. It's to pat themselves on the back for dealing with you for so long and surviving with all, mostly all, their hair intact.

On the opposite end of the spectrum when you get older and the candles accumulate to the point that there's no exposed birthday cake, when you put your face to the cake you can feel it getting 20 degrees hotter, maybe it's at this point that you should be thankful that you've lived that long and forego the birthday wish. Your hair didn't catch fire gettting close to all those candles. That could be a great birthday wish. That is if you still have hair.

Laer didn't blow out all the candles with one breath but in his attempt he gave me an idea. In order to help your friend blow out all the candles, one could buy or make a smaller cake thus reducing the surface area of where to put the candles. Doing this would allow for more of the breath to be blowing candle instead of cake. Do we really want cake spit on our cake slice? It seems to be a win win situation.


Quick hide your children! It's Darryl... just Darryl.

One could just put all the candles in one spot creating an inferno in the middle of the cake (see Darryl's Birthday). Now that I think about it Darryl couldn't blow out that inferno on one go so forget about that theory. All the candles clumped together made for a bigger fire in general. Might as well try putting out a bon fire. I suppose the easiest way to let the birthday boy or girl off the hook is to buy those birthday candles that are digits. Then you'd be dealing with only two maybe three digits.

If you wanted to make the blowing out easier but not too easy you could buy ones and zeros and put the age in binary. Wow, now that's geeky.