What were birthdays like in Medieval times?
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Accepted answer
This is an interesting Reddit I found on the celebration of birthdays. It talks about the origins of all the traditions associated with modern birthdays.
From reading Wikipedia and other articles, it seems that only the highest-up nobles celebrated their birthdays. The vast majority of everyone preferred to celebrate name days. Judging from the book War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, name days were celebrated by inviting all of the family and friends over and having a big feast. Birthday celebrations for the high nobles would've been similar to that, or much like the festivals described here.
Whether or not a person celebrated birthdays also depended on their religion. According to that Reddit article, pagan people like the Romans and Celts did celebrate birthdays, but Catholic and Orthodox Christians did not. Of course, that's not a general rule, either - many Orthodox Christians still don't worship birthdays today, but many do. Same with Catholics.
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Source: stackoverflow.com
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