Las Mananitas

Birthday Beginnings with Chocolate

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A friend of mine, growing up in the Dominican Republic, would awaken on her birthday to the song Las Mañanitas and a cup of hot chocolate. I want to adopt this cultural practice of starting the day with my belly full of warm chocolate!

One of my favorite travel memories comes from my time in Paris when our hotel would serve us fresh-from-the-oven croissants and individual pots of chocolat chaud. I am salivating just remembering how wonderful it was to start to the day with this buttery, flaky pastry and my own silver carafe filled with liquid Parisian chocolate? Each of the mornings I spent there felt like my birthday — just being in Paris is enough to celebrate after all.

Hot Chocolate Creativity

Nonetheless, we can’t have this excellent experience every day in most parts of the world. So, instead, I offer the following few exciting hot chocolate recipes for you to try if you want to add this idea into your birthday fun.

This spicy hot chocolate from the New York Times has chile powder too:

Or People shared chocolatier Jacques Torres’s recipe for a minty hot chocolate:

 

For a little added boost to your morning, you could start with a Kahlua hot chocolate such as this one from Damn Delicious:

Another boozy one that is supposed to taste like a foil-wrapped chocolate orange comes from serious eats:

Or, for hot days when you still want some cocoa taste, you could try this Frozen Nutella hot chocolate:

Combining two of my favorites is this chocolate and peanut butter hot chocolate recipe (plus, I love this site’s name: chocolatemoosey.com):

For your entertainment, also, I end this blog with a Minions parody of the best-known Latin American birthday song.

Do your gifts ward off evil?

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Gift giving on birthdays dates all the way back to when people believed that good and evil fairies had power over people’s fate. That was about last Thursday, right?

According to Happy Birthdays Round the World, there used to be a belief that the date of someone’s birth was fraught with danger as it was a day of change which would make someone all the more susceptible to fairy misdeeds.

To fend off this threat, people would invite family and friends to come and protect the birthday person. Good fate was further guaranteed by giving gifts. In fact, Johnson (1963) tells us, the earlier the gifts and good tidings were offered the better chances the birthday person had of getting through the day of change safely.

Perhaps this is why, even today in Mexico, the birthday starts out with a rendition of Las Mañanitas.

I’ll tell you one thing — I would not be too thrilled to wake up to a mariachi band. A big part of birthday joy for me is the opportunity to sleep-in. I’ll take the help warding off evil fairies though…gifts welcome!

Image from buddhascrystalot00ozak

Image from buddhascrystalot00ozak