Just when you thought kids parties had reached peak out of control – the petting zoos! Elaborate face painting! Vegan cake! – comes the story about the boy who was sent an invoice for not attending a school mate’s birthday party.
According to The Telegraph, Alex Nash, five, was slipped a typed up invoice and threatened with court action when he failed to turn up to a birthday party at the Ski Slope and Snowboard Centre in Cornwall, UK. According to Alex’s father, the family had forgotten about their plans to visit Alex’s grandmother with his siblings, and didn’t have the details to contact the parents of the birthday boy.
The invoice, for approx. $29 AUD, was slipped into Alex’s backpack at school, and an ensuing Facebook barney between the mother of Alex, Tanya Walsh, and the mother of the birthday boy, Julie Lawrence was published in full online.
For Derek Nash, who spoke with both Alex’s teachers who passed on the note, and Julie Lawrence, it all seemed rather over the top. He told The Telegraph,
“I drive all around the south west for my job and I have talked to quite a few people about this. They’re all quite incredulous that this has happened. I thought it was a joke to begin with. I am lost for words,” he said.
However cringe-worthy it may be, the story has quite a good morality lesson in it. If anything, the invoice is perhaps a pertinent reminder that children’s birthday parties should be about fun, games and sugar crashes. Not parents creating stories that will embarrass their children for, oh, probably the rest of their lives, and sending themselves broke in the course of it all.
As Zoe Williams wrote in The Guardian, this act is not just an odd occurence, but a symptom of our keeping up with the Jones’ times.
“However, this act is not as bizarre as it seems; rather, it is the jet of lunacy that signals a deep underlying pressure. In the cost scheme of children’s birthday parties, the brakes have come off; parents are now hurtling towards bankruptcy.”
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
Perhaps it’s time to bring back the days of pass the parcel and a bag of mixed lollies. There seemed an awful less fuss – and international headlines – when things were a little bit simpler.
