You only turn 21 once. Celebrating this milestone in style has become a popular trend among students; preferably, it involves a party with up to forty guests, all dressed to the nines, at the family home.

Parties like these are commonplace in student associations. A huge group of friends will flock to the family home to celebrate the birthday boy or girl. Some guest lists are more exclusive (think: members of a board, a fraternity or a sorority) while others include housemates and secondary school friends as well. The family home is the perfect place for a lavish dinner, preferably served by the parents. Another popular option is to poke fun at the birthday boy or girl in the form of songs, speeches or poems. The mortified guest of honour is forced to sit there while friends share embarrassing stories about their sexual escapades and drunken nights on the town with an audience of red-faced parents and siblings.

Why this tradition is specifically linked to a 21st birthday party is unclear. After all, we officially reach adulthood at the age of eighteen, which is when we can buy alcohol, vote and drive a car. According to the law, however, you are only considered an adult at the age of 21 in the sense that your parents are no longer required to support you financially. Twenty-one is also the minimum age for some professions. In the United States, turning 21 really is a milestone, because it marks the first time you can legally drink alcohol – an occasion celebrated rather exuberantly by some. Just like Halloween, we are also starting to adopt the traditionally American 21st birthday bash. The following students were eager to share their 21st birthday stories with you.

Name: Joeri Hegger (22)
Programme: Bachelor’s degree in International Business Administration and a board member of AIESEC
Party date: 24 August 2016
Number of guests: 23
Theme: smoking hot

Joeri Hegger is a member of the independent fraternity Heerendispuut Faunus. “You can do whatever you want there,” he says. Faunus doesn’t have strict rules when it comes to celebrating the big 2-1. But creativity is appreciated. According to Hegger, the party is all about one thing: “Showing your Nijmegen friends where you came from. How you lived and who your friends were.”
His dinner party happened to coincide with a heat wave. At the time, his small hometown near Venlo had been named the hottest city in the country several times over. That’s why he settled on the theme ‘smoking hot’.

Before dinner, the boys drank beer at the Hertog Jan brewery and enjoyed views of the Meuse (beer in hand, of course). Given the soaring temperatures, suits were out of the question so they ate dinner in their swim shorts instead. On the menu? “The best spare ribs you ever tasted, hot off the grill.” Hegger’s father took two days off to prepare for the party. While the 23 guests devoured their spare ribs, the evening’s formalities commenced with a speech by the fraternity’s president and a poem by one of Hegger’s classmates. His friends showed no mercy. “That’s all part of it,” explains Hegger. “They told stories my parents never should’ve heard.” Fortunately, his parents saw the humour in it and were able to have a good laugh. In fact, they took it one step further and shared some embarrassing stories from Hegger’s childhood with the group. For the first and only time, Hegger was allowed to introduce the fraternity song instead of the president. The icing on the cake (or as they say at Faunus: ’the cream on the pie’) was a trip to the pub with his parents. “They were partying right alongside us.”

Name: Merel van Toorenburg (21)
Programme: Sport, Health and Management at HAN University of Applied Sciences
Party date: 18 December 2015
Number of guests: 14
Theme: none
Merel van Toorenburg decided to go old-school for her party. She sent out hand-written invitations and delivered them personally to each of her guests, most of whom were skating fans. Van Toorenburg is a former board member of the student skating association Lacustris and a current board member of the Dutch Student Skating Union (NSSU). Her grandfather was there, too. “We’re really close,” she says. And he had a great time. “He still talks about my party to this day.”

“It was so embarrassing”

Van Toorenburg invited all of her friends. The women wore cocktail dresses and the men wore button-downs and blazers. “It was December, so the table was set for Christmas, including special Christmas dishes and a Christmas tree in the corner. It was lovely!”
The president of Lacustris held a memorable speech. “It was so embarrassing. It included every silly thing I’d done that year,” she says with a laugh.
Her friends are just as competitive about their 21st birthday parties as they are about skating. “We have another 21st birthday dinner coming up in two weeks for a different board member. She always tries to outdo everyone. She sent out handwritten invitations, added a dress code and planned out the meal a year in advance.”

Name: Marieke Kolkman (22)
Programme: Medicine
Party date: 8 October 2016
Number of guests: 15
Theme: casual chic

“At first, I didn’t know what a 21st birthday dinner was all about,” says Marieke Kolkman. She saw photos of a 21st birthday dinner party on a friend’s Facebook page and decided to set the tone in her own friend group by being the first to host a similar party. She was turning 22 instead of 21, but the idea was the same. The guest list included six university friends, a housemate and three friends from secondary school. A week before the party she changed the theme to ‘casual chic’. “I never wear dresses or heels, but I remember thinking, ’today is the perfect occasion.'”

Delicious food was an important part of Kolkman’s party. “My mum and I both love to cook; it’s our thing. So we went all out and served seven courses.” Her mother had organised the biggest surprise of all by holding a speech and a slide show with pictures from her childhood. “Here’s Marieke on the day she was born, here’s Marieke wearing ugly sunglasses…” Her friends gave her a huge photo album with a glimpse of her future in the middle: Marieke with her photoshopped husband and children. Fortunately, Marieke’s friends spared her the embarrassing yet traditional 21st birthday speech. “But I’m the quiet one in the group. I think it’ll be different for my other friends.” One of her other friends is also organising a 21st birthday dinner. “She explicitly told us to keep it clean because there are a lot of things her parents aren’t allowed to find out about.”

Name: Anne Kerkhof (23)
Programme: Dentistry
Party date: 21 May 2016
Number of guests: 60
Theme: Oktoberfest
Because she was too busy around her actual 21st birthday, Anne Kerkhof – a member of the sorority Nausikaä – chose to celebrate her 21st birthday a few years later. As a result, her guest list kept growing. “You get to know a lot of girls when you study for five years. From the sorority, from different clubs…” Kerkhof realised that she could never fit all of her guests around her parents’ dinner table. So she decided to celebrate her 21st birthday with her brother, who studies in Rotterdam. Kerkhof had been going to the Ardennes with her parents and her brothers for years, so the location was quickly decided. The decor included two large party tents with beer tables and a huge field where everyone could pitch their tents for the night. Kerkhof’s brother loves Oktoberfest. “All of our friends wore lederhosen and dirndls and we gave everyone their own beer stein with a photo of us on it,” she says.

The guest list kept growing
When asked about the distribution of tasks, Kerkhof says: “My brother arranged the technical things and I was in charge of the decorations. My older brother made grilled chicken on the spit and my father works at a croquette factory, so he made sure we had enough croquettes and bitterballen.” Her sorority helped out financially (a 21st birthday dinner tends to be expensive) and paid for the chips. The girls gave her a traditional 21st birthday gift: “A photo album. It’s about this big [she holds her hands twenty centimetres apart] because it’s stuffed so full of photos.”

After the dinner, the guests moved all of the tables to the side in record time to create an amazing Oktoberfest party with plenty of cheesy music.