babyhelpsite.net

For literally centuries, the event of the baby shower has been a completely American type of party.  The baby shower was first dreamed up by a German born immigrant turned American citizen when he was trying to come up with ways to sell his silver wares.  At that time baby showers were only for the very rich, mostly white mothers, and on rare occasions, fathers.

Times have changed dramatically since the late 1700’s.  Now people from all walks of life are willing, and able to celebrate the birth of a child in roughly the same way they did in the eighteenth century.  America has grown as well.  When that German immigrant, Franz Schauer constructed his special little holiday, America had already begun to become a melting pot, but the country did not embrace it’s multi-culturalism in the same fashion as we do today.  While baby shower invitations are certainly nothing new, the thought of baby shower invitations in Spanish would have blown Schauer’s mind.

With the vast increase in Spanish speaking citizens here in the United States, and the spreading of the tradition of baby showers to some Latin American countries it should not surprise us today that the market for baby shower invitations in Spanish is growing at a remarkable rate.  The World Wide Web has shrunk the globe like never before and people from here and from abroad can find almost anything they seek with the touch of a button, and click of a mouse.

If it were any other way; if baby shower invitations, decorations, and games weren’t presented in a multi-cultural way, then certainly those who make their living selling and marketing those products would surely be thought of as fools.  And lets face it, any tradition that has lasted for 200 years or more has done so at least in part; because there was money to be made.  Even the most benign celebration or festival has food, drinks, favors, prizes and decorations that accompany it.  It’s the way of our world, and was already becoming the way of Schauer’s world.

But there’s more to it than that.  In a truly multi-cultural world, the need to understand one another takes on a significant importance.  Why else would a tradition like a baby shower, in the way that Americans have been doing it for centuries, pass outside American borders if not for the understanding of those other peoples as to why the tradition existed in the first place.  Certainly each country or people put their own stamp on how the shower is carried out; there are variations on a theme.  But despite the danger of sounding far too grand, the reason behind these traditions, the baby shower itself can foster something that the people in this new smaller world desperately need.  We need to understand each other, even just a little bit.  And in order to do that, having something in common, something we all share can go a long way in accomplishing that goal.