Birthdays are some of my favorite things. You may have read my earlier post about my own Survivor-themed 21st birthday celebration involving beach challenges from the reality TV show.
However, it doesn’t even have to be my birthday for me to get excited. I always keep a roll of streamers in my desk drawer for birthday decorations and I think the bakery employees at the Giant supermarket on Baltimore Pike who write frosting messages on cakes are starting to get to know me.
The most exciting birthday experienced in college is hands down 21. As a high schooler not even yet 18, this might seem a bit far off to you, but believe me, before you know it, you’ll be thinking about planning your own 21st birthday celebration. There are many different ways to celebrate; some might do it more in more of the “Project X” style, but if you’re more like me, you might enjoy a celebration more like what we had last weekend for my friend KC’s 21st.
KC’s parents were kind enough to take her and some of her friends out to an amazing Indian dinner in Media. Dinner was followed by an ice cream cake and sitting around eating it in “the quad” (a four-person room in the Wharton dorm that I lived in last year with KC, and that KC lives in again with three of our other friends).
Our original idea to ring in the 21st was to do “Painting with a Twist.” There’s a studio in Media, but we weren’t enamored by that evening’s picture (an ugly snowman). Four of us therefore decided to hold our own version of Painting with a Twist in the quad. We brewed a mulled wine, a warm mixture of red wine and apple cider, with some other new spices I had never heard of (star anise? It smelled exactly like black licorice) mixed in.
After brewing the recipe, we sprawled out on the floor of the quad and painted canvases of different nature settings. Given my limited artistic ability, I was surprised by not only how much I was enjoying it, but how well my rendition of a painting I had found on Google Images came out.
While there are many ways to ring in 21 at Swat, I think it’s pretty hard to beat a cold evening spent painting and hanging out with friends and mulled wine.
