B-Rant

- submitted by Sarah Matthews on 05/02/2008

And for the Birthday Girl, Chicken Nuggets and...Caviar?

By Sarah Matthews

My husband looked at me. I looked at him. He had turned visibly green, but it was hard to tell whether it was with envy or disgust. "Christ, do you believe it?" he said. "There are kids everywhere! They're in the living room, the bedrooms, the his n' her dressing rooms, the snooker room and the playroom. They're also in the music room, the gym, the library and the home cinema suite. Who ARE these people?"

We were at a birthday party. A child's birthday party. My eldest daughter had recently started a new school, and we were on the A-list simply because she and little Arabella were in the same class. Evidently, so was half of the London under-eight set.

The Grand Event was being held at Arabella's new house in a neighboring suburb, popular among the nouveau riche. Arabella's parents fit nicely in the category - he's a banker and she's a property consultant. As well as having enormous salaries, they had recently pocketed over £1 million renovating and selling their former house. Their new home, a mock-Tudor mansion with a carriage driveway and staff quarters, reflected their newfound wealth: opulent yet ostentatious.

Ten minutes later, the entertainment arrived. A juggler. A puppeteer. Three face-painters. A throng of fairies (nubile 16-year-olds in tight leotards, too much make-up and wings) with the inevitable throng of balding, middle-aged, paunchy dads drooling and yapping at their four-inch heels. A magician and four guys dressed as bears, their paws making tapping noises on the imported Italian marble floors.

Where I live, the Mummy Standard is quite high - especially when it comes to birthday parties. Having a party at home is actually as rare is not having one at all. Keeping up with the other parents, most of whom are ladies-who-lunch married to investment bankers or traders, is de rigueur, with their social standing taking precedence over the simplicity of being a child. After all, in the long run, who really cares if little Milo or Maya actually enjoy themselves?

Usually, hosting a b-day bash means renting out an expensive venue for all of Junior's little friends, complete with full-on entertainment, a catered meal and the world's most expensive party bag (at one three-year-old's party my youngest daughter was given an expensive set of books and her own paddling pool to take home, the cost of which was significantly greater than the cheapo puzzle we had bought him).

Sometimes it even means hiring a pop star to keep the kiddies entertained."Well, Arabella, isn't this nice?" I remarked to the birthday girl just before we ate, a catered four-course meal replete with caviar canapes, followed by a choice of five cakes adorned with tropical fruit, with unlimited Veuve Clicquot for the grown-ups. Beneath her dark curls, she scowled at me. "Mummy promised that Gabriela from High School Musical would be here," she pouted. "Mummy never does anything right."

When I was little, I'd invite six kids to go bowling or to the local roller skating rink, then back to mine for homemade cake and ice cream. We'd play traditional parlour games like pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey, musical chairs and pass-the-parcel, then they'd all watch as I'd unwrap my presents. After an hour and a half, each child was given a couple of balloons and a candy bar and sent home.

How times have changed. I don't know whether it's London or the difference in decades (or milleniums), but things sure are different around here. Two months ago my three-year-old was invited to a party that only took place last weekend. The super-organised mum emailed invitations detailing the entire future event, from the entertainment to the contents of the party bags to the full menu. She asked about our little cherub's likes and dislikes, food allergies and preferred style of party attire. The only thing missing was a birthday gift registry sign-up sheet from Hamley's, the British equivalent of FAO Schwarz.

I admit, I'm not completely immune to the frenzy surrounding birthdays. Last year, under pressure from my middle daughter, I relented. For the first time we rented out a venue - the Town Hall - and hired an entertainer. Sixty kids gazed spellbound at the magician, a rather overweight middle-aged woman squeezed into a clown suit, before they gorged themselves on white-bread sandwiches, bargain bags of potato chips and carrot sticks (no gourmet catering for us!). The whole thing was impersonal and expensive, and on top of it all I spent the next three weeks trying to find space in her bedroom for 60 unwanted gifts.

This year, my two eldest have opted out of hosting parties. Instead, one is having a family day out at Legoland, while the other has invited her best friend to dinner at Benihana's Japanese restaurant, where a pyromaniac in a chef's hat cooks in front of you as he chucks knives around.

My youngest, who is turning four, will have a relatively small party in the park, where the swings and slides will provide free entertainment. Let's just hope the gold ingots I bought for the goodie bags will be enough.

Sarah Matthews is an American journalist who has lived in a north London suburb for more than a decade. She is married with three young daughters and has chosen a pseudonym - and fake names - to protect the guilty (and avoid lawsuits). But everything she writes is real.