Cardboard Box
This is a story about the day the idea of collection was born.
On a spring day in 2019, my mother and I were having a cup of coffee together, when I decided to find an old box with family snapshots I remembered my parents had in their bookcase.
Holding one of the black-and-white photos, I asked my mum, ‘How old are you in this one?’ even though I already knew the answer from counting the candles on the cake.
Her mother, my grandmother, made the cake, and her father, my grandfather, took the photo with his film camera. My mum was four years old.
We laughed at my mum’s haircut as we gathered all her birthday portraits from the box, spreading them out like cards: one candle, two candles, three, four...
Family archive in a box.
‘Podívej se na ty dortové fotky!’ I commented in Czech on the birthday-cake-photos-situation on the table.
These are a nice collection we have here.
The tradition of "cake photos" continued into the next generation. As I flipped through newer family albums, the scene shifted—from my mother's birthday to mine, then to my brother’s—forming a visual timeline across generations.
The photos seemed to flow from past to present, each collection linked by the ritual of birthday cakes.
I could link stories by theme, though they differed in items, fashions, or hairstyles. The cake recipe is likely unchanged; the flowers are steadfast, but the TV in my mother’s photo differs from the 43” 4K in my parents’ living room nowadays.
The conversations? I’m not sure they differ that much. We say pretty much the same thing across the generations: we wish all the best, we give presents, we sing a birthday song, we hug, we kiss.
On the table that day, we laid two photographs next to each other. Two snapshots 24 years apart.
The math is easy: my mother and I were born on the very same day, April 24.
Cake photo from the story: