That you have to hang the garlands yourself at the party that seems to be life does not sound encouraging to those who have ever had to hang garlands. In our household this is four times a year. It happens late at night when the birthday girl in question is in bed, in order to be able to surprise him or her in the morning with what was a simple living room the day before, but has now been transformed into a real festival site with combined forces. Very festive, but that doesn’t happen automatically. First the birthday crate has to be taken out of the storage room, and then wholeheartedly curse the one who stuffed all the decorations back so carelessly. Paper streamers simply cannot be untangled from their kite rope without tearing crucial parts. You can repair them with tape, but they don’t hang nicely anymore. After all, the charm of a pendulum is the repeating pattern, and if there is suddenly a hole, a squeeze or a twist, it is immediately noticeable. Plus duct tape makes everything look ugly and cheap. Imagine a Fabergé egg. Now one with tape on it. Do you see?
The plastic flag garland is considerably more durable, except that you can cook enough plastic soup to fill the entire Sargasso Sea. And in terms of appearance, plastic is a bit, well, plastic. More of a prison hangout than a living room. Anyway, if all the paper streamers are broken or crumpled (and they are), you’ll be glad you have the plastic backup. The next challenge is to find attachment points for the ends. Our house is surprisingly poor in protruding nails and ceiling hooks, forcing us to improvise. On the one hand you use a window handle (it can no longer open, but you don’t grind for that anymore at half past eleven in the evening) and on the other you attach it to, say, a bottle of wine. Or a cookbook. Or anything else that’s shaky and clumsy.
Once the streamers are hanging, it’s the balloons’ turn. Tip: never buy balloons with fiddles in them, such as stars and confetti. First of all, it’s no use to you, because you don’t see them: it’s not as if they keep swirling gracefully when the balloon hangs somewhere. Secondly, balloons have a tendency to pop, whether at the hands of the dog, the children or out of sheer grittiness, and you’ll keep finding the fumbles everywhere for years to come. Provided, of course, that you manage to blow them up. Some balloons allow you to blow yourself a pulmonary embolism without increasing the size even a millimeter, but that aside. The biggest challenge remains to inflate the golden numbers that represent the reached age. They have a unique system in which you have to push a straw through the plastic in the right place to inflate them. That seems difficult but it is not; it’s impossible. Recently, the plastic straw has been replaced by one made of cardboard, so that you can inflate the large plastic thing in a more environmentally friendly way.
Finally, when everything is ready (and the supermarket is closed) you appear to have six candles for the cake of a son who turns 10.