Birthday Parties in Indonesia

This past weekend we had our 39 birthday party for our children. That’s the total for all four of our children here (not counting my son from my first wife who lives in the States). Forty-three birthday parties. That’s quite a few. If I average out the cost at about two million rupiahs per party, that amounts to a staggering 79,000,000 rupiahs over the past 15 years. In dollar terms we can say that it’s about nine thousand dollars. When I attempt to figure out where the money has gone over the past 16 years of marriage, parties are one thing that I never thought of.

When Su started having birthday parties for the kids (our eldest daughter, Mercedes, had the first one when she turned one), they were fairly small events – a few friends and all the relatives (a sizeable group in itself). Somewhere along the line just about everyone in the neighborhood turned up being invited along with all the relatives, and as the kids entered school, their classmates. As the number of guests increased, the venue moved from inside to outside. As our Bali houses are on a small amount of land (200 sq. meters), we had to hold the parties out in the street.

We live in a small, fairly self-contained Muslim neighborhood in the north of Bali. I don’t know much about the actual logistics of how my wife goes at getting the street closed (it’s not really a unique event as most folks in the neighborhood do the same when they have a wedding), but she does it and ends up with a tent placed over the street to keep out the sun or rain. Chairs are set up, food is cooked, decorations are placed everywhere. In the early days of the street parties, the festivities were restricted to a few party games, a cutting of the cake, a few prayers, and then a distribution of food at the end. The kids would take their food home to eat – something common in Indonesia. However, at some point, Su started providing entertainment – Balinese dancers, Javanese dancers, Balinese clowns.

I still haven’t figured out this party thing although Su’s example began to be followed by other mothers in the neighborhood, although not quite as extravagantly as our parties. Just one more slice of paradise.