90s Birthday Party Culture: The Un-Instagrammable Purity
By: Shani Silver
Tags: Nostalgia, Culture, 90s, Social Media, Life

The most visually unappealing and deeply satisfying decade of our lives.

Photo by Greyson Joralemon on Unsplash

We live in a time of visuals. Optics. What it’s like doesn’t matter half as much as what it looks like, and if you find that upsetting, you were probably a kid in the 90s. You know, the 90s, when photos were printed on paper and stored in albums and were, by all realistic estimates, only ever seen by about 14 people, max. The point of birthday parties wasn’t style or showmanship, they weren’t even that centered around celebrating someone’s birth. They were about letting kids loose, wearing them out, and artificial flavors. The birthday parties of the 90s were not pretty, but they were perfect.

When life changed, when social media put us all on a global stage for critique, the way we experience life changed, too. Events became less about how much fun we were having, and more about how much fun it looked like we were having. Otherwise, manufactured photos wouldn’t exist. Follow-me moments wouldn’t be captured. We’d just grab the shot as-is, in the moment, and be done with it. But we don’t. We style. And nobody styled in the 90s, because the only moments that mattered were the ones we were living, not the ones other people would see us living on the internet, a thing wouldn’t really matter for another ten years. In any area of human history, the most fun we genuinely have isn’t captured in photos, but rather in sight, scent, taste, touch, and memory. Which is why we probably look so fondly on the 90s, an era that was aesthetically revolting, but experientially divine.

I was born in 1982, so we’re talking very late 80s and early 90s-era birthdays, people. A June birth meant that all the kids from school had scattered to the wind and my parties were just as likely to be attended by actual friends as any random stranger children who could scam my mom for a piece of cake. There’s a girl sitting at the table in my seventh birthday party Kodak photos that I have never met in my life. Modern day birthday parties require “venues” and “planners.” Our 90s mothers and fathers were dealing with some bowling alley manager named Brian who was half-high of shoe disinfectant and did little more to contribute to the party’s success than retrieve stuck balls.

Party invitations came in a box and had to be hand filled-in like Mad-Libs. Often the theme of the invitation had no relevance whatsoever to the party itself, though if you were lucky there’d be a little graphic of a cake or a party hat somewhere in the margin. The birthday boy or girl wore clothing from Target as opposed to a custom design via Etsy that matches both the floral arrangements and table linens, because 90s moms knew that Hawaiian punch wouldn’t wash out. If you left a birthday party without your fingers and upper lip dyed food coloring blue, you didn’t do it right.

My parties were a special marriage of both 90s birthday party culture and 90s single mom culture, so they were always at McDonalds. Affordable, convenient, minimal parental involvement required, and the entire event could be shoved into a black trash bag in seconds. My main memories of these events are climbing on filthy playground equipment (this was the era before the fancy remodels, I was still riding around on a little carousel made of hamburger horses), and eating fantastic grocery store birthday cake with white and pink buttercream icing that had developed a delectably delicate crust. I remember being squished into the backseat on the way home among presents.

The best parties, incidentally, were not my own, but those I attended. My friends’ parties, my brother’s friends’ parties, siblings of either of our friends who had parties, when you live in a Fort Worth, Texas Jewish community, nobody leaves anybody out. Most weekends involved a birthday party of some kind, which when I think about it is probably why we all sometimes feel like such sad FOMO failures when our weekends are void of plans. We rage on the weekends because we were raised to.

The birthday parties of the 90s were real ones. They were about gathering children together so that we could act like absolute chaosmongers for two or three hours while our parents gossiped in the smoking section. They were about kids having fun and eating garbage and getting Barbies and Hot Wheels as presents. Somehow we always came home covered in stickers.

You remember, you were there. Putt-Putt, Chuck-E-Cheese, roller skating rinks, Pizza Hut, Discovery Zone, Laser Tag. They were spaces built to suck the energy out of kids and the money out of parents, designed to look like a franken-venue of what might happen if a casino and a toy box had a baby. You looked forward to going, because being there meant that it was time to have fun. These spaces served no other purpose, and to a kid, a place you could go to do nothing but run around and have fun without rules and confinements was solid gold.

No matter the primary intent of the establishment, every single one of these places had an arcade room where your parents cash and quarters went to die, and kids went to earn 500 paper tickets that would buy them a Ring Pop. If I close my eyes I can hear the sounds of digital laser beams and mechanical voices congratulating someone who just earned a high score. Racing games where you couldn’t reach the pedals. Whack-a-Mole mallets too heavy for all but the prepubescent kids. Skee Ball projectiles that were miraculously never used for destructive purposes. Game buttons indestructible no matter what kind of pounding they took. Filthy, grubby little joysticks, not a disinfectant in sight. Honestly I think Pac-Man was responsible for developing our immune systems, I really do.

Remember the carpets? Low-pile, primitive graphic design rarely straying from a blue, yellow, red, and green color scheme, and vacuumed only tangentially, with a steam cleaner on hand for biohazards. Paper napkin dispensers so useless your mom always brought paper towels from home. Waxy little water cups that made leaking and disintegrating an art form. Two-liters of soda lined up at the end of the table like soldiers poised to charge.

There’s a reason why mentally reverting back to these spaces is both fun and a little bit sad. And I don’t think that’s just because it’s a time that’s passed. I think it’s because it’s a time that’s lost. Our birthday parties were about pure, carefree joy that centered around playtime, and all it’s ugly, unmanicured glory. That’s not something we see much of anymore now that the world has gone beautiful. Nineties birthday parties were a visual crime, but an experiential gift.

We all have a few sticky old photos of our faces in front of cakes aflame, our forehead hair dangerously close to peril. We have posed photos with our parents that are now the stuff of #mothersday content. But that’s really it, a handful of classic moments captured on film and printed at Walgreens. You don’t have selfies from inside a giant plastic playscape or boomerangs of the ball pit. And I’m sorry, but I think that’s for the best.

I worry about present-day parties. Everything is so polished now, so stylish. There’s so much theme, coordination, it all fits within a carefully manicured frame, a purposeful moment intended to be branded and preserved for all time in our feeds. And that’s all fine, if some energy is reserved for letting go, letting kids experience the effervescence of pure fun, the kind no one ever thinks to capture. I might be wrong, but I’m seeing a generation of kids who have to stick their fingers in slime or eat fruit into a microphone to feel something, so…yeah.

I’m not saying that modern day birthday parties aren’t fun for kids. I’m sure they are, I’m just going out entirely on my 90s kid limb and saying that ours were more fun, because they were less Pinterest-perfect. The most fun moments of our lives really can’t—and probably shouldn’t—be captured. I don’t remember every moment of the birthday parties I had or attended, and I can’t even remember all the parties themselves. But I do have a very deep and lasting memory of the feeling of being a kid, the feeling of freeform fun that wasn’t structured, planned, or hashtagged. If it sounds arrogant to assume that one childhood era was better than another I really don’t care. I’m a 90s kid, I care about slap bracelets and pogs, the important stuff.

Our birthday parties didn’t have step-and-repeats. There were no photo booths, photo props, or coordinated family outfits. Decor rarely went beyond a handful of balloons used as markers to indicate which bowling lanes were ours. Because we didn’t care what it looked like, and we didn’t have to. No one would ever see it, but everyone who was there would experience it, fully. Except your dad with the video camera permanently affixed to his shoulder. He doesn’t count.

I come from a time when minimal effort could result in maximum fun, and I’m worried we’re losing it. Maybe my birthday parties weren’t as worth the visual memories as they are the emotional and tactile ones. Maybe modern birthday parties are more pretty, but 90s birthday parties were more pure. Maybe I’m an asshole for valuing one iteration of childhood more than another. But I’m the last generation that grew up without the ‘gram, and there’s beauty in that, to me.

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Shani Silver is a humor essayist and podcaster based in Brooklyn who writes on Medium, a lot.