An Athenian Diary

20

Birthday Party, Half-Greek, Half American

Here's the deal. Kids' birthday parties in Greece are a major occasion. Lots of parents rent a restaurant, which supplies food, drink, and entertainment for the hoards that come. In fact, there're whole businesses just devoted to running kids' parties. Mega, the kids' channel here, has an entire show consisting of nothing but videos of kids' parties at a local establishment, accompanied by an endless tape loop of the Greek happy birthday song. These businesses are surely necessary for parents' sanity, because an invitation to a kid for a party is construed as an invitation to parents, siblings, grandparents, whatever relatives of may be hanging around -- I don't know at what degree it stops.

This context was swimming around in our heads when Caroline announced, with her irresistible firmness, that she wanted a birthday party -- at the house, whose sole decoration was a single Halloween pumpkin.

After a lot of tergiversation and delay we finally bowed to the inevitable, and agreed. But then came the real horror -- how to organize it, and survive? I inquired at the School about having them cater the party (and even thought about hiring a clown -- luckily, this idea never germinated even to the phase of being expressed to Edie), but Edie in the end, the logistics professional, figured out the real solution. We invited the kids for 2-5 pm, Sunday, November 2 -- hours timed perfectly to coincide with no normal Greek meal. We called all the parents personally to try to get a count of heads, and spent Saturday buying food and drink, and thinking up an activity (baking cookies in the shape of amputated fingers -- thank you, Ranger Rick  magazine, for a ghoulish Halloween idea easily adapted to our circumstances!). And so, balloons floating around the living room, three cakes on top of the fridge, and a battalion of sweets and booze armed and waiting in the wings, we hit our beds Saturday night, hoping for sleep enough to fortify ourselves for the onslaught.

In the end, it was not bad -- in fact, I think, a success. Four of Caroline's five invitees arrived, two with siblings, two without. Three moms and one dad stayed too. It was a congenial "parea" (a wonderful Greek word covering any collection of compatible people). There were, among the parents, Beth, an English girl who married a Greek and now helps run an English-language bookstore called Bookworms in an Athenian suburb, and Najeeba, a Palestinian whose husband works for a big Palestinian company that relocated 15 years ago from Beirut to Athens (worth filing under evidence for the Levantine character of Athens, one of those traits I loved about it 20 years ago that's less in evidence today). Najeeba was fasting for Ramadan (so she was proof against all our stocks of victuals) but still had her sense of humor (of course, the month is young!). Beth's husband Paris was full of enthusiasm for everything, and proud of his command of English (you could see him looking sometimes not for a word that would work, but precisely the word that would work), for he lived with Beth in the UK many years before they returned here. He seemed perfectly comfortable in a sea of girls (of course, he'd better -- he has three daughters). Vasi's all Greek but majored in languages and used to run a phrontisterion (the ubiquitous schools for private education; more on all this later) teaching German and Italian. The girls were all delightful and full of life, as girls that age are. Invidious though it would be to single any out, one must note anyway Iris, a ball of fire, full of funny remarks and never at a loss for words -- she'll go far!

The girls made the finger cookies and everybody seemed to enjoy rolling the dough and fashioning the gruesome fingers. Afterwards, they played like mad in the courtyard of Loring Hall, with its strange tree and multiple bushes for hide and seek. The parents sat in the living room and chatted. Eventually, one by one, families picked up and left, each with a little treat bag (bought from the ever-so-fashionable Wrap Store, which sells nothing but stuff to put stuff inside of). The last girls stayed till almost six, when their father (a doctor who'd had a meeting at the nearby Hilton) and mother (a stunning Greek beauty) swooped them up in a flurry of Greek.

The presents were, of course, great. A wonderful oil painting set, a new and detailed book about Greek myths, a great new jigsaw puzzle, a Barbie VW (punch buggy!), a handmade birthday card, and, from the family, gymnastics Barbie, a beautiful jewelry box with a ballerina who stands and dances when it's opened, and her own American Girl doll.  Chronia polla!

November 8, 2003

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