What began as a teenage joke birthday card has been exchanged for 81 straight years
'Neither one of us has any intention of passing before we're 100 because...'
Pat DeReamer and her best friend, Mary Wheaton, met during World War II when the former's family moved to Indianapolis in 1942. DeReamer went through a tough time settling in, but Wheaton, she told WLKY, picked her up out of the gutter, and they became good friends. In 1944, their friendship reached another milestone when DeReamer gifted her best friend a hilarious card on her 14th birthday. Wheaton, who was quite overwhelmed by the present, signed it and gave it back to DeReamer on her birthday a month later. What began as a small birthday ritual eventually turned into a lifelong tradition that the best friends have been following for about 81 years now.
The card, featuring a cartoon dog on its cover, read, "Here’s wishing you a birthday that really is colossal." Inside was a massive dinosaur skeleton with the message, "'Cause it’ll be a long, long time before you’re an old fossil!" They never planned on sending each other the same birthday card every year, but it intuitively became an annual tradition that both DeReamer and Wheaton loved following. "Every year we'd talk about it, and it would give us some reason to call each other and talk," DeReamer said. Both women moved on in their respective lives, joined different colleges, got married, had kids, and even grandkids, but never for once did they take their birthday card exchange lightly. In fact, DeReamer and Wheaton's tradition has earned them a position in the prestigious Guinness World Records for the Longest birthday card exchange since 2004.
Both of them now live far away from each other; while DeReamer is in Kentucky, her friend, Wheaton, resides in Carmel, Indiana. The duo doesn't meet each other often, but their wholesome 'birthday-card' tradition stands as a testimony to how genuine connections continue beyond physical boundaries with just simple gestures. "I think as you get older, you're supposed to have more time, but you don't seem to have as much time to share as we did when we were younger," DeReamer confessed.
Despite the distance, when asked what has kept their friendship so tight over the years, DeReamer said, "The secret to everything in life is love — showing and sharing love in any way you can, whether it's just a hug or whether it is stopping somebody with a smile or whether it is shaking a firm hand or even saying to one of your children, 'Gee, I love you.'" Moving on, the best friends said they have no intentions of ending the tradition. "Neither one of us has any intention of passing before we're 100 because we've got to get the card going over a hundred. It's like we have a competition with the world … and we love this, still keeping in touch with each other," DeReamer explained.
In a world of texts and video calls, DeReamer and Wheaton are still keeping their childhood tradition of sending each other the same birthday card alive. In contrast to what is generally believed, handwritten notes or cards make people feel more special than text messages and emails. A poll of 2,000 Brits found that a majority of respondents (70%) consider paper notes meaningful and exciting to receive. Moreover, more than half (57%) feel it strengthened bonds with their loved ones. Receiving a card or a handwritten note is, in fact, so therapeutic that 19% said it provided a brief respite from their worries, and 28% reported crying happy tears from opening one.
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