100th Birthday {Signs}: Celebrating Grandma’s Century Mark

We celebrated my grandma’s 100th birthday last week. I’ve written about her before. In typically humble fashion, she didn’t want a monumentally big party, even though we reminded her that this was a monumentally big milestone. In the end we gathered family and celebrated one of our matriarchs in the way she wanted.

My brother, the best family chef, cooked up her favorite foods: chicken schnitzel and mashed potatoes, emblematic of someone born in Austria but who spent more than 80 years in the United States. My parents brought in her favorite dessert from her favorite restaurant: chocolate mousse cheesecake from The Cheesecake Factory.

This left my sister-in-law and me to take the lead on decorations.

My first thought was How funny it would be to get those big shiny balloons that Gen-Z kids get for their birthdays? You know the ones… think “Blurred Lines” video. They’re sorta obnoxious but also look like fun, and always photograph well. They were a silly detail that everybody could get behind, and then in front of when it came time for photos.

A cursory search on everyone’s least favorite but most useful platform, Amazon, turned up a set of balloons that spelled out “Kissing Goodbye to my 20s,” which was so preposterous that it actually worked, with a little bit of help. All I’d have to do is change out a 9 for a 2 and we’d be in business. You really haven’t lived until you’ve spent 20 minutes blowing up these stupid things with your parents, explaining to them what the fuss is about.

My sister-in-law, Amanda, had a big idea: a banner with Grandma’s faces through the years, each wearing a party hat with a big whopping 100 on it. The personalized banner is something you can arrange and order on Etsy, and was another visual hit of the party.

At one point, between dinner and dessert, I was sitting next to Grandma and across from Amanda (and her mom). Grandma marveled at how four versions of her face—including one black-and-white photo taken when she was only one—could be made into a banner (Reminder: she is 100!). Amanda did her best to explain the process, including a basic description of Etsy, most of which was incomprehensible to Grandma (Reminder again: she is 100!).

It really is remarkable how a photo from Vienna, Austria in 1924 was hanging in our living room in Massachusetts, in 2023, next to a photo taken in Brooklyn in the 1970s, another taken in suburban New York in the 2000s, and a fourth taken in Massachusetts in the 2020s.

Additionally, one of the gifts for Grandma was a digital picture frame, where photos can be added via an app on our phones. At the party, we took pictures and immediately loaded them onto the frame. To us, this was commonplace, simple, fairly unremarkable. But to Grandma, having been born in an era where taking and developing photographs was a far more intricate and deliberate event, this seemed like magic. Grandma even told us that back then—forget the birthday party—taking photos was THE event!

Grandma survived the Holocaust, but her parents didn’t. It is impossible to forget that. But it’s not impossible to forget how incredibly different the world is today than it was 100 years ago.

We don’t all have grandmas whose presence can remind us of that.

I thought the signs would be silly minutiae, at best complementing (and complimenting!) more momentous celebrations. They were bought online with a few clicks, in a matter of minutes, and arrived within a week. But I didn’t think about how perplexing and fascinating these signs would be to Grandma, who could never have fathomed where these photos would end up 99, 50, 20, or even 3 years ago. Time is a funny thing.

As Grandma stared up at the faces banner, she began to talk about the oldest photo. And that got her talking about her childhood in Austria.

And that got her answering some questions about when she left Vienna (age 16), and how she got to America (via Italy). And now, new people were hearing her stories and about her utterly remarkable life. It was history book shit come to life.

What started as a funny and creative idea became a real reflection point that night. I know I want to be more thoughtful about taking photos. I want to make sure I don’t miss moments, just because it’s a little awkward or inconvenient to ask people to gather around. You may not know where or when or how those photos will come back, but they will.