A Song for your Birthday

It’s February 1st. This is traditionally the day I ran a poll on Livejournal asking people to pick their birthday song (such as this one from 2011). I attempted to do one last year, but it went nowhere. People have migrated off of Livejournal, and the traditions have changed — people don’t publicly post on their wall/journal/blog to wish someone happy birthday; instead, they send a message or write just on the recipient’s wall. I’ll note this is still a lovely tradition: two weeks ago, on my birthday, I got loads and loads of posts on my Facebook wall wishing me happy birthday — they made up for a lack of cards or calls in real life.

My tradition nowadays is to sing you a birthday song on your Facebook wall, or by private message to your LiveJournal/Dreamwidth account (if you have posted there in the last year). But what song should I sing? My default song is my favorite birthday song, the one that Sheriff John sang to me while I was growing up: The Birthday Cake Polka. But my song needn’t be your song…

Here’s how to pick the song that you get on your birthday…

1. Make sure you are on a service that tells me when your birthday is. Facebook does this — and you don’t even need an annoying fancy app. Livejournal and Dreamwidth do this. Don’t make me remember; I’m getting older and can’t even remember… what was I talking about?
2. Go to the List of Birthday Songs. This is the page of my blog that lists all the songs that are birthday related. If you have a song not on the list, let me know and I’ll add it to the list.
3. Figure out what song you want. You can look through all the lyrics here.
4. Comment on the List of Birthday Songs. Comment with your Facebook or other ID, and let me know what song you want and where you want it to be sung. Comments on the base list are best. I’ll try to move over comments made on this post or the Facebook or LJ/DW cross-posts, but no guarantees.

It’s as simple as that. I’ll try to honor requests made elsewhere, but Facebook history and comments are forgotten quickly, and I don’t always check old posts.

P.S.: To SpunkyLizard, who inspired this. You no longer seem to post on LJ, but Happy Birthday anyway.