That’s How It Should Be

Soon it will be my birthday. Living in England means it’s going to be a quiet day. That’s not how it should be done. It should mean lots of visitors, especially the evening when you decide to ‘keep your’ birthday. Saturday evening it’s likely close family who will have kept the evening after your birthday free, knowing it’ll be when you celebrate.

Parents or grandparents will come on the day of your birthday, for “it would be awful to let the day slip by quietly.” You would go to the supermarket the day before and stock up on standard food. So standard that the girl at the till will ask if it’s a birthday party, meaning you will get a large discount. That was a new one; we never had that when I still lived in the Netherlands. When you’re young you simply get your mum to make a load of cakes and snacks.

Of course, there are now lots of modern parties, offering all kinds of foods and drinks. That’s not how it’s supposed to be done. It should be coffee and cake first. Mocha Cream is my favourite. You arrive at eight or a few minutes before. Arriving after eight is a bit rude; clearly, the birthday person wasn’t that important. 

After a while, you offer more coffee with a posh biscuit. Soon after that, you offer a selection of cheese chunks, sliced sausage, small crackers with cream cheese etc. Preparing them took all the time between dinner, flinging the hoover round and switching the coffee maker on, just in time for the first guests.

With those snacks, you offer a sheet of paper with a list of drinks for people to tick. That way you know what to pour. Then you repeat the snacks and drinks until the last guests have left around midnight. That’s how a birthday is done.

Your lounge will look like this for the evening, which is wonderful.

The evenings are loud, filled with tall stories and jokes. I don’t know if you have met many Dutch, but one of our main skills is to hold three conversations at once, making the evening fly by. It also means lots of laughter, loud guffaws (one of my favourite words, no idea how to pronounce it, sorry) and shocked exclamations. By three o’clock in the morning, your ears will be used to silence again.

When you write about family gatherings, what pictures do you have in mind? Mine are filled with uncles holding forth, my dad sitting in his favourite chair telling a joke that we have heard too many times, and everybody laughing because it’s still funny. It’s aunts tutting at tales, whilst knitting or fingering the latest cloth bought at the large local market. Family talking about walking with God. It’s about making yourself invisible as a child so you can stay up longer before your mum spots you and sends you to bed. It’s laughing out loud at a hilarious story told by cousins, knowing it’s probably not true.

When writing about groups, it’s hard for me to imagine quiet evenings, people talking one at a time and hardly audible chuckles. How about you?

 

Maressa Mortimer is Dutch but lives in the beautiful Cotswolds, England with her husband and four (adopted) children. Maressa is a homeschool mum as well as a pastor’s wife, so her writing has to be done in the evening when peace and quiet descend on the house once more. She loves writing Christian fiction, as it’s a great way to explore faith in daily life. Because of her interest in writing, Maressa is part of Creativity Matters: Find Your Passion For Writing, an anthology encouraging people to write.

Her debut novel, Sapphire Beach, was published in December 2019, and her first self published novel, Walled City, came out in December 2020, followed by Viking Ferry, a novella. Beyond the Hills is the second book in the Elabi Chronicles, and was released on June 18^th 2021. All of Maressa’s books are available from her website, www.vicarioushome.com, Amazon or local bookshops.