WHEREAS you've got something important going on; now therefore be it RESOLVED by local politicians that it's a bona fide BIG DEAL

One rainy night this month, as Cambridge's nine city councilors went about their business of investigating stinky sewers and faulty street lights and costly electric rates, they also wished William Daley a happy 75th birthday. They congratulated Sarah Lynne Cooper and John David Lundell on their recent marriage. They bade Eugene Sullivan a speedy recovery.

And by the end of the night, they had congratulated and welcomed and mourned their way through 107 resolutions marking the passage of time in ordinary lives. Cambridge may be a city of more than 100,000 residents, but for a few minutes every week, the debates over taxes and crime subside as the councilors pay tribute to big birthdays and tiny arrivals.

"It's almost like a city-funded political brochure: 'Councilor so-and-so is very concerned about you and your family,' " said Robert Winters, who posts a very detailed blog on Cambridge governmental affairs.

Even Boston, where the election of city councilors from districts keeps politics local, has far fewer ceremonial resolutions. (In Cambridge, all councilors are elected citywide.) Last month, Cambridge offered up 184 such resolutions; Boston councilors approved 57. Somerville and Brookline had five between them.

Cambridge councilors are famous -- or infamous, depending on who's talking -- for passing resolutions about political issues far beyond the city's borders. Councilor Marjorie Decker is behind many of those orders; to protest the war in Iraq, she brings individual resolutions naming each of the American soldiers killed since the last meeting. (Those resolutions -- 65 in May -- are included in the council's ceremonial orders, which partially explains the city's huge local lead in this regard.)

Councilors have voted to criticize President Bush, the World Bank, and the USA Patriot Act. They've boycotted World Bank bonds and companies that do business with Burma or supported the Indonesian invasion of East Timor. They've supported workers at a hog-processing plant in North Carolina and the right of illegal immigrants to vote.

But the other category of resolutions, called "ceremonial and memorial," represents old-time politics more than new government activism. On April 9, the councilors congratulated Chuck Colbert on his bar mitzvah. March 19, they applauded Raina Williams for being named the most valuable player in her swimming league. On Feb. 5, they congratulated Armando and Dottie Paolo on their 50th wedding anniversary.

Even some of the council's most vociferous critics, including blogger Roy Bercaw, view the ceremonial resolutions as benign. He is rankled, though, by the occasional anonymous birthday wishes sent out to "a special Cambridge resident."

"You don't know who it is," he said. "But they know."

The city clerk's office used to print a copy of each resolution before the meeting, but gave up that practice in recent years. "There are too many of them, so we've stopped printing them because we were killing too many trees," said Donna Lopez, deputy city clerk.

But those who are named in resolutions -- or their families -- still receive official copies held by a ribbon in a dark blue folder. Some are requested by families; but most are bestowed, unasked, by city councilors. City officials said they couldn't estimate the cost of preparing and printing the resolutions.

No one initiates more ceremonial resolutions than Councilor Michael A. Sullivan, whose family has been involved in Cambridge politics for generations. The City Council meets in the "Sullivan Chamber," a room named after his family ; a Sullivan has been on the council since 1936, and several Sullivans, including Michael, have been mayors.

Michael Sullivan remembers people saying that his father, Walter J. Sullivan, a former mayor, never missed a wake. The age of the Internet has helped him carry on the family tradition of personal politics: Sullivan says he begins his days at 5 a.m. by scanning newspaper death notices online, looking for the recently departed with a Cambridge connection: people who died here, lived here, were born here.

Sullivan proposes hundreds of commemorative resolutions each year, mainly, he says, for people his family knows.

"Cambridge, despite the big-city aspect, has a small-town feel to it," Sullivan said.

Winters, who teaches math at Brandeis University and the Harvard Extension School, is no devotee of the City Council. On his web site, Cambridge Civic Journal, he argues that selecting nine people randomly from the city's streets would yield a better council than the one that now oversees the city. Still, although he once disdained the resolutions, conversations with old-time Cambridge residents convinced him otherwise.

"It's part of the way politics is done in Cambridge," he said. "It works."

Is Sullivan going for two? The Political Trail, Page 9

The resolutions tend to honor longtime Cambridge residents and their families, rather than the new transplants drawn by jobs at universities, technology companies, hospitals.

"Within the city, there's this other city," Winters said. "Those are the people who become the firefighters, the police officers. You don't relocate to Cambridge to get a job working in Parks and Recreation."

Winters began keeping score of which councilors brought the most resolutions. By his tally, last year the council passed 1,481 ceremonial resolutions, with 823 of them -- 56 percent -- coming from Sullivan. (Although the council officially includes Decker's resolutions for US Iraqi war dead in its totals, Winters, somewhat more logically, includes them with the council's foreign and national policy proclamations.)

Councilor Craig A. Kelley proposed 30 ceremonial resolutions last year, fewer, by Winter's figures, than any other councilor.

Kelley said he doesn't mind the resolutions; but he proposes them only for people he knows well.

"I don't go out of the way to do them," he said. "I guess it's just not my style."

Kathleen Burge can be reached at kburge@globe.com