Happy birthday to you, and to you too
Yarmouth County cousins Harold and Jim Cook have been exchanging the same birthday card since 1962
Yarmouth County cousins Harold Cook and Jim Cook really took the word ‘practical' to heart when they exchanged a birthday card for the first time in 1962.
With Jim and Harold's birthdays just eight days apart in March – Jim is the older of the two – they decided to keep passing the card back and forth.
Back and forth.
Back and forth.
Now, six decades later, the card is still making the rounds.
This year both men turned 76.
During all this time, they only missed giving the card to each other six times, and that was likely because it had been misplaced.
That won't happen again, though.
“I have a place now,” says Harold. “For the last probably 40 years, it's been in the same place in my filing system.”
It's like Jim says, “You know the saying, older and wiser. I'm older. He's wiser.”
Meeting each other for the first time as babies in the days following their births – they were even in the same nursery – the two cousins share a strong bond. It was Harold who first exchanged the card – which is actually a brown paper bag, folded into the shape of a card.
There are a few small rips and creases, but otherwise, it's in good shape.
The card's verse, in imperfect grammar, reads:
‘Practical cards is what should be gave – useful, and plainlike and fitting to save. So here's birthday greetin's on this paper sack. When mine's due you fill it, and send it on back.'
Harold threw some candy inside when he first gave the card to Jim. He told him he didn't have to put anything inside of it when he gave it back.
“We never purposely decided way back when to keep it going,” says Jim. “But once we started, we said, ‘well, this is working,' so we kept it going.”
The two men grew up in the village of South Ohio, Yarmouth County. The village was a tight-knit place and there were lots of kids their age – like a dozen or more – living in the houses surrounding theirs. At a time when kids were kids and always played outdoors, they had lots of adventures growing up. There are memories of skating parties on a pond, bonfires and even once hooking a camp up to a tractor and hauling it to a new home. And there were other shenanigans.
Jim remembers a time he and Harold were walking home from school the day after a snowstorm. For whatever reason, they thought it would be funny to exchange their clothing.
“We decided I'm going to dress in his clothes, he's going to dress in my clothes, and we'd go home that way,” laughs Jim. “So we stripped right off in a snowbank on the road, changed our clothes and took off for home.”
Harold's father, who had been a sea captain, died of a heart attack when Harold was just four years old. So his uncles – including Jim's dad – and even Harold's older brother, became substitute dads.
Harold's cousin Tom Moses also often rounded things out when they were younger. Harold, Jim and Tom called themselves the three musketeers. Tom, though, wasn't part of the birthday card exchange.
The birthday card has been hand-delivered. It's been mailed. It's even made trips across the U.S. border to South Carolina, Florida and Ann Arbor, Michigan.
On the card, the men have written down each year that it's been exchanged – along with the six years they missed.
Inseparable during their youth and teenage years, they did part ways for a while when Jim, an electrician, went to study and pursue work in Ontario, and Harold went to university and, as a doctor, was on the move himself.
Still, they remained in touch, wrote letters, and kept the birthday card tradition going.
Their roots eventually brought them back home to Yarmouth County, where they remain as close as ever.
They say growing up, and still today, it was always the sense of community and family that was most important.
As for the birthday card, it's as fun to exchange it now as it's been throughout all of those years – although there is an end game planned.
“It's our relationship and when it's done, it's done," says Harold. "We've made a pact that whoever goes first, the card goes with them."