The Burden of Birthdays

Birthday parties have become so lavish that some parents dread the responsibility.

Group singing is rapidly becoming a lost art in our wired culture. Members of the Greatest Generation who are still among us remember the simple joy of singalongs around a piano in someone’s living room or a church hall, but that’s a pleasure largely lost on most of us who are younger.

There are just four occasions — outside of hymn-singing in church — when we typically consent to remove the earbuds, stow the smartphone and join our neighbors in song.

The first is a solemn observance: singing the National Anthem together at a sporting event or community gathering.

The second is during the seventh-inning stretch at a baseball game. Against all odds, the first stanza of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” — a pop song of a bygone era — stubbornly endures.

The third is at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve. Although the Scots dialect of “Auld Lang Syne” is largely incomprehensible to modern English speakers, most...