The day you were born

What’s on the keepsake

The keepsake is a portrait image with the date and its weekday, a drawing of the moon that day with its phase, and the month’s birth flowers. It leaves out the days lived, so it doesn’t go out of date, and the weekday rhyme, which needs its context to read kindly. Both are on this page instead.

Making one for someone else

Choose “Someone else’s” and enter their birthday. You can add their first name, and the keepsake will say “For” and their name at the top. Their date and name stay on this page: they aren’t saved, and they don’t change a birthday you’ve saved for yourself. If they live on the other side of the equator, turn on “Southern Hemisphere view” to show the moon as they’d see it.

Where the facts come from

The moon is worked out with the standard method in Jean Meeus’s Astronomical Algorithms, checked against NASA’s catalog of moon phases, and is accurate to within about a day. The weekday lines are from the old “Monday’s child” rhyme, first printed in 1836. The flower meanings come from two Victorian flower dictionaries, by Kate Greenaway (1884) and Henrietta Dumont (1851). Each section links to a page with the details.

What’s saved

If you choose to remember your own birthday, it’s saved in your browser so the birthday tools can use it. Your hemisphere choice for your own birthday is saved the same way. Neither is ever sent to us. The keepsake is made in your browser, and sharing it sends only the picture, never a link with the date in it.