Everyone, at one point in their lives, faces the difficulty of coming up with a creative message to scribble inside a birthday card. To save you all the excruciatingly intense thought process, below are generic phrases that can be used through all levels of friendships.
Family and People You Call Family:
Depending on your relationship with your family, the continuum can go one of two ways: extremely sentimental or outright insulting.
Examples:
"I'm glad you were born!"
“I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Oh, it’s your birthday?”
Close Friendships:
If you consider yourself to be relatively close to the person, you can afford to share silly things, bring up old memories, or leave a thumb print of tomato sauce.
Examples:
“You know, you share a birthday with David Villa (Note: this example only works if the birthday is on Dec. 3rd).”
“I hope you enjoy the lifetime supply of salamanders I worked so hard to get you.”
“Fun fact: a million people share your birthday. That makes you one in a million!”
Semi-Formal Friendships:
If this is an acquaintance you’re talking about, a colleague, or your doctor, you might want to consider coding the birthday message in some language that’s not commonly used. It’s still casual, yet creative.
Examples:
…./.-/.--./.--./-.--
-…/../.-./-/…./-../.-/-.--
.-.-.-. (Morse Code)
Hau'oli la hanau! (Hawaiian)
Sretan rodendan! (Croatian)
At Your Discretion:
Quotes are always cute. Not only can they fit in any of the categories above, but they can also fit in any category ever. Databases like thinkexist.com or quoationary.net both have birthday categories. Thinkexist.com will even let you look up authors by birthday. Remember to credit the author; sometimes, that’s more impressive than the actual quote.
Here are a few to jumpstart your creativity:
“If you live to be one hundred, I want to live one hundred minus a day, so that I’d never have to live without you.” (Winnie the Pooh)
“We know we're getting old when the only thing we want for our birthday is not to be reminded of it.” (Anonymous)
“Last week, the candle factory burned down. Everyone just stood around and sang Happy Birthday.” (Stephen Wright)
If you have time, mail the card. Not only does that show support for the postal service, but it also shows that you took time out of your busy schedule to do something nice. Handwritten things still impress people and it provides a tangible memory that they can later stick into their scrapbook or photo album. Get creative!
Yevheniya Shuportyaka - Genius and a little bit of modesty mixed together with enough self-confidence to make things work.
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