Birthday Parties

Alright, let's talk about birthdays. You might be Ymirborn and have no idea what the whole fuss is about, or Earthborn and not understand today's kids with their weird new habits. Or maybe you're just wondering what on Earth, well, Ymir, your birthday is supposed to be. Well, let's explain the complications from both sides, shall we?   So used to be, you were born on one day out of 365, sometimes 366, leap years like here but less frequent. Oh, and we actually had real days, not just fake ones. After all, Earth had an actual day-night cycle, not a tidal-locked eternal daylight. Your birthday was an actual proper representation of when you grew a year, a full rotation of the planet around the sun, older.   And yeah, that was an actual birthday. Not a faked one for privacy purposes. You knew the day you were born and had to fill that in on a lot of forms. And people actually knew. Hell, people knew told others who their parents were.   So let's compare that to Ymir, shall we? First, we got very strict privacy laws. All birthdays are hidden, because otherwise people could figure out who you are based on medical history. After all, can't risk that the children of highly-ranked personnel are identified based on their birthday. With the low population count numbers on Ymir, that kind of number is actually identifiable. So we have the whole silly 'random Saturday of your birth month' and suddenly we only have 50 fixed birthdays for the entire population. Lotsa overlap there, when you have only a seventh of the options.   Now you Ymirborn may not see the big deal and might be wondering, what's with the existential crisis? Well, you could have two people born on the very same day on Earth, but they have different birthdays on Ymir. This because their moment of going into cryo, combined with when they got out of it, decides the calculation of how old they kinda are. Don't forget, we were on ice for over a century. And here on Ymir, time is literally a construct, as again, no actual day-night cycle. Our days are literally faked.   So yeah, our official birthdays are suddenly different. Months have different lengths, two of them were eliminated, oh and days are 25h instead of 24, to fit better with our biological cycle. And a so-called year doesn't match an actual Ymir year. In other words, what used to be a symbol of us actually aging an actual planetary year, is now utterly randomly and completely fake. Which really makes it hard for us old geezers to keep track of reality.   I think that about sums it up. Time is an illusion and a social construct, birthdays are fake due to either weird privacy laws or the utter fuckery that cryo-sleep has on the calculations, and some of us just miss the night sky and the moon. Which means that now I want a drink.   Anyway, yeah, so that's why birthday parties are now way different. You share with way more people due to only 1 day out of 7 counting as a potential birthday, and to some it's just fake nonsense. So we have more group parties, but also people who just pick an unbirthday and celebrate that instead.