Making sure a child's birthday is celebrated

The party for Faith and Joy, sisters celebrating their 4th and 11th birthdays, respectively, kicks up the typical din of tots, toddlers, and tweens. Faith, her braids decorated with flower-shaped pins, is a little tired after a long day and leans on the kitchen table, burrowing her face into the arms of her seated mother. Joy hurls herself into the festivities, getting her face painted like a cat's along with other children.

Fun soon gets the better of Faith, and she and Joy join the crowd of children pulling the ribbons on the birthday piñata and scrambling for the gushing candy; plucking rubber ducks from a tub of water for prizes; and lining up for cupcakes, frosting, and candy. For 90 minutes or so, the sisters escape the sometimes stressful straitjacket of the single bedroom they live in with their mother.

Home for this party is Evelyn House, a shelter for homeless families in Stoughton, where domestic scenes play out against institutional decor -- the public laundry room, the hallway lined with hand railings, and door after door leading to residents' rooms. Evelyn House provides a vital service, but not the privacy of one's own home.

Faith and Joy's party comes courtesy of Birthday Wishes , a Newton Centre nonprofit ensuring that children in more than 30 homeless shelters don't miss childhood's simple pleasure of a party honoring their birth. On the eve of the season when Christians celebrate the birth of a homeless baby, two volunteers in Stoughton are Catholic teenagers serving as modern magi, bringing gifts to children who might not otherwise get any. They're among Birthday Wishes workers who seek their God in the smile of a child.

"These kids in homeless shelters, we'd like them to be treated as we'd like to be treated," says Lauren Applebaum , director of Kesher Newton , a Jewish after-school program that operates from the same church building that houses Birthday Wishes.

As part of its ethics curriculum this year, her program is studying the command of the Jewish leader Hillel , seconded in the New Testament by Jesus with perhaps a better-known formulation: Love your neighbor as yourself. When physical proximity to Birthday Wishes introduced her to that organization, Applebaum realized a golden opportunity to teach the Golden Rule.

Kesher Newton's students "can connect very specifically to [homeless children] because it feels like them," she says. "Something like a birthday party is really concrete for kids. . . . They can easily imagine what it would feel like not to have one." Also, working with Birthday Wishes will make an apt segue into the program's coming discussion of Judaism's emphasis on pursuing justice, she adds.

The Catholic volunteers working the Stoughton party went above and beyond the call of spiritual duty. Their church, St. Mary's in Foxborough, requires them to do community service in preparation for the sacrament of confirmation next year. Both 15-year-old Sarah Giaidino and 14-year-old Deanna Santos had fulfilled their service requirement before the birthday party. Both wanted to be there nonetheless. "I like little kids," Sarah explained.

Launched four years ago, Birthday Wishes is the brainchild of three friends -- Lisa Vasiloff , Karen Yahara , and Carol Zwanger -- veterans of volunteering who noticed that for a homeless child, there often is no birthday party at all. Shelter staffers don't have the time to organize a party; resident mothers often don't have the money or emotional wherewithal. The trio discovered that some mothers, shamed by their inability to buy a cake or gifts, didn't tell their children they had a birthday.

The organization's website says, "Birthday Wishes was founded on the belief that every child, regardless of living situation, should have their birthday recognized and celebrated." That philosophy makes the group "a little angel" to Barbara Dowdell , Faith and Joy's mother, who moved her children to Evelyn House after relocating from Alabama.

"Some of us are trying to save money to get apartments," she said.

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