Reveal Parties
July 28, 2014
ELAINE writes:
Has anyone heard of a ‘reveal’ party? I heard about this about a year and a half ago. A pregnant woman gets together with friends and family and the sex of the child is revealed. There’s usually a cake, door prizes, etc. Of course, this phenomenon may not last long because of gender confusion.
Anyway, I had an ex co-worker over the other day, her daughter-in-law is expecting her first child so they were going to have about sixty to eighty people gather together at a local restaurant to ‘reveal’ the gender of the baby. I’m just guessing here, but I’m pretty sure it’s going to be a boy or a girl — but who knows. So in addition to this celebration I’m sure they will have a huge number again for a baby shower— something which in my opinion has also gotten out of hand. Just wondering if any of you had heard about reveal parties.
Laura writes:
It’s news to me.
— Comments —
Mary K. writes:
I’ve never heard of throwing a huge party specifically for revealing the gender. That seems absurdly grandiose. Chances are it was more of a baby shower. I have known people who asked the ultrasound tech to write down the gender and put it in an envelope. Then they would take the unopened envelope to the bakery and order a cake with pink or blue icing in the middle. Then at home with their other children they cut the cake and all found out together. I thought it was a cute idea, if one is going to find out the gender ahead of time. With my son we knew in advance and with my daughter we waited. I think next time we will wait again.
It seems to me that baby things are getting more and more “gendered,” contrary to what one might expect in this increasingly GBLTQWXYZ world. Whenever I’ve bought baby things I’ve aimed for gender neutral with passing down to future siblings in mind. I would never have bought a pink stroller. Girls’ clothing is definitely getting frillier. Perhaps it’s merely a marketing ploy to get people to buy more stuff, but I still find the phenomenon of separate boys’ and girls’ toys, furniture, car seats, everything, very strange.
Laura writes:
Reveal parties do seem to be a real phenomenon.
I would say that “gendered” baby equipment is indeed smart marketing.
Thomas F. Bertonneau writes:
I subscribe to the critique of these emergent institutions as vulgar and narcissistic, but what I notice has to do with the language that names the phenomenon. Thus reveal is the verb, more or less in the infinitive; the noun would be revelation or revealing or (slightly archaic) revealment. I have noticed that several perfectly good nouns have shrunk down to their verbal stems. One example is failure. Instead of saying that “the electric car was an epic failure when it was introduced early in the millennium,” people will now say something like, “it was an epic fail.” Similarly, connection and disconnection have become connect and disconnect, employed as nouns. Your readers can probably supply other instances.
Bracketing the obnoxiousness of the idea for a moment, what else might one call a “reveal party”? One might call it an “announcement party.” The parents-to-be throw it to announce the sex of the child. I suppose that the verb to reveal carries a more dramatic connotation than the verb to announce, which is what self-celebrators require.
The explanation is probably the simplest one: In an age of diminishing consciousness, language, like everything else, devolves towards the infantile.
Matthew Schneider writes:
The commonest example of Dr. Bertonneau’s “noun shrinkage” is “hate.” Instead of the perfectly good noun “hatred,” what one hears these days is “Why all the hate?” and “right-wing hate.”
Gail writes:
Indeed, this is a new thing among the young folks. My daughter and her husband just had one, which was kind of an outdoor affair at the home of her in-laws. They did the thing with the envelope, but had a piñata-type box with a drawstring, which they hung overhead from a tree branch. They stood underneath while her husband pulled the string, allowing pink confetti to cascade down upon them. Neither of them knew ahead of time; they gave the envelope and supplies to their next-door neighbor, who assembled the box.
My daughter made it clear that there were to be no gifts. They supplied a lovely array of food and drink and it was just a celebration with family and close friends. My daughter’s name is Maria Noelle, born on December 8th (the feast of the Immaculate Conception). She is a beautiful, traditional, Christian girl who has worked very hard since she was a young teen to supply her own needs and to bless others, and who has wanted nothing more than to be a wife and mother. She would love to have several children, and is trying to find myriad little side jobs that she could do from home, in order to stay there with her baby. This is difficult since the mortgage on their townhouse takes up most of her husband’s take-home pay. The price of housing, whether renting or owning, is proportionally much higher these days than it was when I was their age.
I kindly ask you to add her and her family to your prayers in the upcoming months.
Thank you!
