Is it meaningful to blow out the candles on a birthday cake??

It wouldn’t be an exaggeration when I say that I long to get older by a year just because I love the birthday celebrations with the cakes (which have steadily graduated from a girly micky mouse shaped pista one to dark chocolate based fantasies). More importantly I love blowing out the candles, especially the determined ones that refuse to get blown out. I still remember the struggle I had to go through in my first association with these contagious re-lighting candles, a couple of years ago in the bubbly corridors of my post-graduate hostel.

Now that makes me wonder as to why and how this tradition got passed on! I will tell you where my skepticism stems from. According to the Hindu tradition, light is a metaphor for knowledge, then doesn’t blowing out the candles suggest a shift towards darkness & hence ignorance?

 So I tried to dig deeper into the actual take off of the practice ! 

Most of the articles that I bumped into revolved around it having originated from an early tradition that believed that smoke from candle would take one’s wish or petition up to god! Now that made me laugh – While here we are criticizing our hindu traditions as we consider them to be hollow, in front of us lies our most lovable tradition borrowed from the western lands which at the onset appears to be exceedingly shallow.

There were a couple of other explanations which revolved around Germans being skilful manufacturers of candles having inducted them into the picture. Now that was definitely a brilliantly crafted marketing gimmick that Germans did which has survived centuries just the way our Akshaya Trithiya / Valentine’s Day has.

The most renowned of all explanations is about how the Greek made a certain form of cake as an offering for their moon goddess and planted a candle in the centre of it to make it glow like a moon. Well, that demotes the entire tradition into a decorative piece.

There was no other meaningful explanation that I could lend my ears to when a verse from the bible caught my attention. It was not essentially about candles but on incense which can be considered as a sister of candles. “Let my prayer be set forth before thee as incense; and the lifting up of my hands as the evening sacrifice.” Mining deeper helped me understand this better. The incense (candle) lay dead, without fragrance, with no capacity whatsoever of soaring till it was kindled. Similarly unless there is a flame or passion in one’s heart, the prayer shall not reach God and the benefits can’t be seen on mortal earth. Once the incense or candle is lit, the fragrance and smoke from it soars ahead spreading its boundaries.  Similarly if one doesn’t light the fire in the heart and kindle the passion, the prayers and aspirations will not go any far. Thus to achieve anything at all which could well connote to prayers reaching the ears of God, one needs to kindle the passion or light the flame in his heart.

Now that is convincing and satisfactory to an extent. Oops! Well, it seems like we have gotten our hearts in the wrong places. It is not about blowing out the birthday candles but actually about lighting them! What a gross misinterpretation & mis-orientation!