Distributed to Society, World
What Can We Learn From Strange Birthday Traditions Around The World?
Different cultures treat getting older in a variety of ways
Getting older is something that happens to every human on the planet. How people deal with and celebrate the inevitable joys of ageing varies considerably. Sometimes these celebrations are just fun but others can grant insight into a culture and what they consider to be important in life.
Some countries don’t celebrate individual birthdays
Bhutan
In Bhutan, individual birthdays aren’t celebrated and a lot don’t know the actual date. This is for a couple of reasons — their calendar is different and doesn’t always tie up with the Gregorian calendar and also, it just isn’t important to them.
The Bhutanese do measure their age in years, however, and so for administrative purposes, the entire country gets one year older on the 1st January. This is official and has even caused problems at customs when officers grew suspicious that an entire Bhutanese delegation all had the same birthday.
It is worth noting that Bhutan is a country that doesn’t measure GDP — it measures GNH, Gross National Happiness. So maybe this lack of focus on an…
