Birthday
A birthday is the date on which a person celebrates the first time they were added to the birth registry as a future tax payer. In years gone by, a birthday was celebrated by presenting the person with a Hallmark card and a cake set on fire.
Nowadays, birthdays are celebrated by spooning copious amounts of 31 flavors of ice cream into one's mouth, sans fire. Birthdays are 'fondly remembered'. This memory can be easily triggered by looking at a pink spoon and getting a glazed look on one's face.
The dawn of the ice cream age
Many historians attribute the meteoric rise of ice cream to a series of advertising sorties by Baskin-Robbins and their brand champions, Agency.com. Children today still reap the benefits of these pioneers. In fact, many of the programs started during the Ice Cream Wars (2007 - 2009) still exist today, including the Baskin Birthday Club.
Background: The turn of the millennium marked the beginning of the 'multi-tasking' decade. No one knows why this phenomena was considered acceptable, yet many of our senior citizens still bear the scars today of this life quality erosion. Sadly too many people never knew the joy of being part of the birthday club, these unenlightened poor souls were forced to deal with what we would now call barbaric birthday rituals.
This era of drab and joyless birthdays lingered for many years until a new era began. An era of enlightenment, of pure, sweet, creamy joy. Like most revolutions, it was a hard fought battle that finally led to a new way of thinking. As Emerson once said, "Every revolution was first a thought in one man’s mind". In this case , that one man was a Mr. Bob Dobilina. A man we now know as the leading frozen field-marshall in this hard-fought war. At one time, this near mythical man, was simply a proprietor of a Baskin-Robbins in Brooklyn, New York.
The Ice Cream Wars (2007 - 2009)
Regarded by many as the dawn of the ice cream age, the Ice Cream Wars were 2 long and delicious years. The war started quite simply with the attempted verbal assassination of Mr. Bob Dobilina - proprietor of the Baskin Robbins store on 1993 Atlantic Ave - by a rival Stone Cold Ice Creamery owner, Natesan McCreedy. Eye witnesses claimed McCreedy entered Dobilina's store and shouted:
" Only thirty one flavors? You stupid people. Why just around the corner at my store you can get upwards of 26,500 different flavor combinations. What is wrong with your simple palettes? It is about combinations and options, not traditions! This man does not respect you. Put down the chocolate chip..."
Interrupted by a chorus of boos and the occasional flying ice cream , McCreedy slinked back to his shop. Cheered on by his loyal customers Dobilina, made it his life's work to bury McCreedy from then on. His unwavering motivation was to make McCreedy eat his words, for Dobilina knew in his heart that it was not endless combinations but traditions and memories that made people smile over one of his expertly crafted sundaes.
McCreedy's mistake - and others who entered into the war - was assuming the war was about flavors. In a best selling book about this era, "Flavor for life", the author describes how flavor played a part. But it was the ability of Baskin to tap into the idea of birthdays building memories and of the individual being hooked in to a kind of interconnected birthday world, that set them apart from the competition and ultimately left them the only scoop standing.
"It was never about adding more flavors, or giving flavors kooky names that made them seem more fun, and it certainly wasn't about getting the kids behind the counter to sing for tips. It was about reminding people that ice cream is that flag on top of every memory mountain. The thing that connects them back to birthday celebrations with their family. With fun. With smiles."
Symbols and traditions
When the Ice Cream Wars were over, some new icons and traditions identified themselves as natural heirs to the throne. A throne once held by Hallmark cards and cakes on fire.
The most notable of these new icons and traditions are:
The Pink Spoon - Once a simple spoon found in Baskin Robbins, now the quintessential birthday icon. It represents an ideal - the birthdays are a time to reconnect with fun, memories, family, friends, and life.
En-Capsulators - Originally called Baskin Birthday Time Capsules, these digital time capsules became online respositories for birthday memories and a giant interconnected network for everything birthdays.
Trivia
- One of the longest running channels on the now de-funct technology television was the Birthday Shout Out Channel.
- In a survey of 100 people, 97.3 said: "Birthdays are fun!"
- The most common birthday is October 5th, whereas the least common is May 22nd. Although an astonishing fact, it's still not as astonishing as why one of the most astonishing questions of the year 2016 has yet to be answered.