What should a birthday letter to a child say?

Name the year, not the presents. One concrete thing they did that took effort, told back to them in detail, is worth more than any amount of general praise — and it is the part they will still be reading at thirty.

Why do we put candles on a birthday cake?

The direct ancestor is the German Kinderfest of the 1700s, where a candle was lit for each year plus one for the year to come. Older still is the Greek practice of round, moon-like honey cakes lit with candles as an offering.

Is it worth writing a letter every year?

It is the most-kept keepsake there is, precisely because it is short and annual. Parents who start one at four are usually astonished by the stack at twelve.

Birthday Letter to Your Child — Printable

The story

The Birthday Fairy keeps an office full of candles — one shelf per child, one candle added each year — and her entire job is the count. She is said to be fastidious about it, and to take a dim view of anyone who claims to have forgotten their own age. She arrives before breakfast, never at the party, because in her professional opinion the morning is the real birthday and the party is just the celebration of it.

Where it actually comes from

Birthday candles are usually traced to Germany — eighteenth-century Kinderfeste placed a candle for each year of a child's life on the cake, plus one extra for the year ahead, and kept them lit all day. The older root is the practice, recorded in ancient Greece, of offering round honey cakes crowned with candles, with the glow standing for the moon. The idea that smoke carries a wish upward is far older than either, and appears in some form almost everywhere people have made fire.

What it does for a child

Birthdays are the one day a year a child is invited to consider their own life as a thing with a shape — a year that ended, a year that starts. A letter that names something specific they did well turns a day about receiving into a day about being known, which is a far more durable kind of happiness. It is also, in practice, the single easiest keepsake to keep: one a year, in the same box, and by eighteen you are holding something remarkable.