Not Sure Where To Put This

[bednobs]

but why in our culture are 10s and 5s so special?for example, "big" birthdays with extra celebrations are 30, 40 50, 60 etc
anniversaries are special at 25, 30 40 and so on

why are anniversaries so important? as an example, i find it harder to manage feelings an bereavement anniversary whereas in reality, theres not much difference between 1 year bereavemnt and 1 year five days since the bereavement

[grasscarp]

The big birthdays with tens are because you are entering the next decade of your life.
25th wedding anniversary is big I imagine because you have managed to stay with someone for a quarter of a century.
anniversaries are important because you remember what happened on that particular day in an earlier year.
You would not link it with a different day eg 1 year 5 days

[flump1]

Menorable milestones I think bednobs, either that or they copy the tombola train of thought whereby one wins if a ticket ends in 5 or 0 !

[DTCwordfan]

They are, in short, reminders of our past, our history, our relationships and, perhaps, make us think about our increasingly limited futures.

[grasscarp]

Thank you for sharing that DTC!

[Old_Geezer]

It's just a way of marking time passing. One would expect it to be so surely ? 1s obviously, it is the same time of year but 1 year on. 10s because of the decimal system we use make that significant. 5s and 25s as common factors of 10 and 100.

[Hopkirk]

The 21st is more special than being a meer 20 years old.

[jno]

I think those are different questions with different answers.

10s: as OG says, it's to do with the decimal system; we just think in 10s. Even more so in hundreds (think cricketers); and 25 and 50 are subsections of that.

You could say that 5 is halfway to 10, in the same fashion. I'm not sure 5 really is a big anniversary, though.

21 was I think traditionally the age of adulthood, when you could drink, vote and so on. This isn't generally true any longer but the tradition lingers on. Exactly why it's 21 rather than 22, I couldn't tell you, though.

[belrec]

Itis because we have a base 10 number system, because of our ten fingers.

So we sub conciously like numbers that are divisable by 10 and also 5 because that is neatly hlaf and the fingers on one hand.

If we had 8 fingers (4 on each hand) then we would celebrate 8, 16, 24 etc

Not sure about 21 though :-).

[Brinjal]

I will be 60 this year. It's kind of special. I feel about 30 something. I can't quite believe that Little C F is that old.