If you mean in the manner we do in the West, the answer would be “no” or at least rarely, depending of course on how traditional the individual or the family is. Certainly, remembering and celebrating your birthday every twelve months according to the Roman calendar is not important to the Balinese and is considered a novelty for young children and some teenagers.
This is not to say that a birthday in the Balinese sense is not important to them. It’s just celebrated at different intervals and in a different way. Balinese celebrate their birthdays every 210 days or every six months according to the saka calendar.
There is one exception to this however – newborn babies. Their first birthday (oton) will be at three Balinese months post-natal. This ceremony represents the first time they will touch the earth – up until this time they are carried everywhere by the parents or other family members. Three months later there is another ceremony to mark the six-month period and this is continued six-monthly throughout a Balinese person’s life.
Balinese don’t celebrate their birthdays with cake, candles and presents and there are no formal invitations. Instead, the family makes offerings called natab and the person whose birthday it is will pray for health, happiness and guidance amidst wafts of ritual smoke. At the end of the ceremony, a piece of white cotton called benang sri datu is tied around the person’s right wrist, hung over the ears and one is placed on the head. These all fall off in time. Whilst on the body, they are said to protect the wearer from negative influences such as demons known as buta-kala.
If families also adopt the Western tradition of yearly birthdays, modern children may effectively get three birthdays a year!
