Birthday Party Supplies - Making Birthday Special

All the world – divided though it is into cultures, countries and castes – stands together so far as celebrating birthdays goes. Birthdays are celebrated with as much zeal and vigour as a festival. People seemingly adore turning a year older!

Birthday parties have been celebrated since eons. As soon as the human beings perceived the lunar cycle and were able to calculate the passage of an year, they began to commemorate anniversaries. Initially, birthdays were celebrated for deflecting demons by collecting all one’s well wishers together.

Traditions most popularly encountered at a birthday party are:

-Birthday cake - it initially used to be round, but now comes in a variety of shapes
-Birthday candles - generally same in number as the age of the person, but in some cases, it is one more than the age and that one is left aflame for good luck
-Blowing out of candles/Birthday wish - blowing out of all candles in one go can be followed by the person asking for a secret wish
-Birthday song - ‘Happy Birthday to you’ chants
-Birthday gifts and cards
-Birthday decorations - typically, there are balloons, crepe streamers, confetti, whistles and cheerfully colored long pointed paper hats

One cannot do without celebrating one’s birthday with a party. Especially because planning a birthday party has become very simple these days.

Markets are blooming with birthday party supplies. They are arranged neatly into packages that have all the necessary items – cakes, candles, return gifts, decorative – in accordance with any party theme.

Several themes have been used to design birthday party supplies:

- Age theme - be it the first birthday party of a toddler or the seventy-fifth of a septuagenarian, birthday party supplies are ready for each. The candles, cakes, cutlery and balloons all bear the relevant number on them or come in the shape of the numbers themselves or bear messages accordingly.

- Color theme - one may choose one’s color of choice and order the supplies accordingly. One may choose solid colors or prints or both in combination just as one may wish.

- Dress theme - this works especially well for children’s birthday parties. Guests are asked to dress up according to the theme of the party - say fairy tales, cartoon characters or world leaders - and the birthday party supplies match the theme

- Culture theme - Egyptian, Oriental or Island birthday themes are popular

All birthday parties are incomplete without birthday party balloons.

Winnie the Pooh opined, ‘Nobody can be uncheckable with a balloon,’ and expressed in words what every young heart felt.

There is a history behind balloons. The first balloon was made in 1824 by Professor Michael Faraday in the Royal Institution, London for experimental purposes. Hydrogen was used as the filling gas.

A year after the use of balloons in science, they were used as toys, in 1825. A rubber manufacturer called Thomas Hancock did the task. However, it was only in 1847 that the closest ancestors of today’s balloons were made.
J.G. Ingram of London made early prototypes of the balloons using vulcanized rubber.

Latex is used most frequently today for making birthday party balloons. Latex is biodegradable while the other material, plastic, is not.

Toy balloons have been modified variously.

-Colors - solid colors, prints, polka dots, stripes
-Themes - balloons and cutlery carry messages like ‘Happy 1st birthday to you’
-Shapes - animal shapes, heart shape, cartoon shapes
-Filling gas - helium and hydrogen being light, the balloons reach the ceiling and look different - they can even be used like piñatas!
-Walking balloons - these are the latest newest change in balloons to come. Life-like figures of popular characters are cut out of foil or latex and filled with air. Thick pads at the base of the figure make it ‘walk’
-Foil cut outs - characters are shaped out of foil or latex and made to float. Air is used as filler and amount of air decides the number of days it will stay afloat.

Make your birthdays fun with the all new birthday party balloons. They are so much fun!