Birthday-mates.com kind of has two birthdays -9th of March 2013, and 20th of December 2013. I’ll explain.

Sometime in February 2013, I met a lady online, who lived a few kilometers from me. And after a while of chatting with her, it turned out that her birthday was on the 6th of March, while mine was the 9th of March. She was going to have a little get together and she invited me over, but more than that, she suggested we have a joint birthday celebration, which sounded like a great idea.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to attend the event as something came up.

Fast forward to December 20 of the same year. This time around, it’s my brother’s birthday. And to celebrate, he took a whole bunch of us out to have dinner, including my mum. We were a party of 7. While we were wining and dining, and when the time came to cut his cake and sing him happy birthday, the group (a party of 4) at the next table turned around and exclaimed how it was also their father’s 70th birthday that day as well.

We all exchanged pleasantries, jokes, phone numbers, took pictures etc etc. Then the 70 year old celebrant bought his birthday mate a bottle of wine. Which we all at my table drank with delight. It truly was a festive and happy mood, with lots of laughter, food, drinks and more.

Some pictures from the night…

Then the gathering came to an end and we all went home, all the while marveling at the coincidence of the two birthday mates sitting next to each other at the same restaurant. Especially me

A few days later, as my mind went back to the events of that night, it struck me how, a few months back, in March, I came very close to having a similar joint birthday celebration with an ‘almost’ complete stranger. And how the same joint celebration had in fact taken place between two (groups of) strangers. Then it hit me…

Wouldn’t it be nice if a lot more people could experience that same joy and feeling on their special day?

And that is how Birthday Mates was born. 🙂