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Since when have celebrated our birthdays? The question must seem trivial to historians since they have never asked it. Interested in social rhythms and the scansion of life, the author of this paper invites the reader to follow the path of his research, beginning with his astonishment at how belated and erratic the celebration of birthdays remained at the outset of the modern era. Working backward in time, he attempts to explain why, when throughout the Middle Ages people had been more concerned with the date of someone’s death than the date of their birth or their exact age, an important shift occurred in the fourteenth century. From this point on, the focus shifted from death to life, from the death anniversary to the day of birth, a process that would have wide-reaching consequences. However, our initial question can only be answered by an analysis that stretches over a long period: it was Goethe’s 53 candles in 1802 that sealed the invention of the birthday in the sense that we know it today.