Those years, they didn’t celebrate birthdays with candles and cakes, not the farmers anyway. They still don’t up today because in Santorini the nameday is mainly celebrated.

But when the child was one year old, all the relatives were invited to celebrate his birthday. This happened only once. This birthday was very different. They put the little boy in front of a big sifter in which they put some objects whether it was a boy or a girl. For the boy it was a paper boat, a trowel, a wooden measure, an ink vase, a shoe-last, a barley bread e.t.c. If the boy touched the boat he would become a sailor, the pen he’d love letters and so forth. That way they would predict the child’s profession or so they believed.