Carla De La Lá, a columnist for the Spanish newspaper La Razón, wrote in a column published on 4 August 2026 that an error impossible to correct had decided she was born on that date, meaning she wakes up every year to birthday messages alongside Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, and former United States President Barack Obama.
De La Lá said she used to try to correct people who congratulated her, telling them it was not actually her birthday, but that this only made her seem unpleasant, ungrateful and suspicious, since people accept a change of sex more easily than a change of birth date. She said she now simply says thank you, having concluded that the technology company Meta knows more about her, and about her readers, than they know about themselves.
The Happy Birthday song
She said the real punishment is not the congratulations themselves but that some arrive alongside the birthday song, particularly the version by the Spanish children's pop group Parchís, which she said turns a crude melody into a blast of radioactive confetti deserving its own trial at the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
De La Lá said she hears the song often and has developed a phobia of it. She described a cheap wine bar beneath her home, popular with lively groups, where someone is nearly always celebrating a birthday and breaks into the song. Few things cause her more anguish, she said, than the Parchís version, with the possible exception of the Spanish singer Rosalía's song "Bizcochito," which she said thankfully plays less often. She called the tune a sound monstrosity that should be banned, describing it as one of the most powerful anxiety triggers imaginable, worse than an MDMA hangover.
How one song took over the world
De La Lá questioned how such an unpleasant composition achieved what she called an absolute musical monopoly across the planet. She noted there are thousands of love songs, Christmas songs, drinking songs, funeral songs and even breakup songs with choreography, yet only this one exists in every language to mark surviving another year.
She asked when humanity supposedly signed the "planetary treaty" forcing everyone to repeat the same lifeless refrain whenever someone blows out candles, and when people agreed, with what she called the submission of a sleepwalking herd, that a single melody would preside over every birthday across cultures, generations and social classes.
She described the song itself as ugly, lacking complexity or flow, yet still victorious and humiliating, comparing it to a moral toll for having been born that always starts too high or too low. She said the real collapse happens in the third verse, when the celebrated person's name has to be inserted: some sing Carla, others Carlita, someone tries to squeeze "María del Carmen" into two syllables, and, in her words, democracy stops working. By the end, she said, everyone is holding a different note while the person being celebrated stands smiling like a hostage.
Origins of the tune
De La Lá traced the song back to 1893, when sisters Patty and Mildred Hill published it as "Good Morning to All" for schoolchildren to sing. The birthday lyrics were added later, around 1912, which she said explains a great deal, since the tune functions less as a song than as a teaching tool meant to get twenty children to pronounce four lines together without stumbling.
For decades a publisher charged royalties for the song's commercial use, until a judge ruled in 2015 that the copyright did not hold up. The song was declared fully free of copyright in 2016. As De La Lá put it, the song was freed, but "we remain imprisoned." She compared it to a network effect applied to melodic torture, arguing that a celebration song does not need to be beautiful, only simple enough to let a dozen unrehearsed people, drunk adults and children alike, start and finish roughly together in a restaurant.
Mexico's alternative
De La Lá noted that Mexico has at least raised a formal objection with "Las Mañanitas," a genuinely different song rooted in folklore, without a single author or what she called a predatory publisher, and whose lyrics have shifted by place and generation over time. She said the rest of the world had docilely gone along with the English-language tune regardless.
Being half Mexican herself, De La Lá said she resists accepting that she is sung to twice every year, but changing the tradition would require everyone to change at once, something she said she does not know how to achieve. She said the song was taught before anyone had the judgment to question it, and that it remains lodged in memory, tied to childhood, to candles and to the anxiety of being watched while making a wish that never comes true.
