HUNTSVILLE, Ala. (WHNT) — For a lot of people, a birthday card might have a sweet message, if you’re lucky, a little bit of cash on the inside, and then it will end up in the trash or tucked away in a drawer somewhere. Although one family took a simple card and turned it into 50 years’ worth of history.
That story started 51 years ago. It was June, and David Nillson was turning 16 years old.
That’s when his cousin, Amy, decided to send him a birthday card.
“It says happy birthday to a good-looking relative, and on the inside it says save this card and you can send it to me on my birthday,” said Amy Uptain. “And I did not think anything about it.”
Flashforward 10 months later, it was Amy’s birthday, so David decided to return the favor and follow the directions in the card.
“Being a 16-year-old with no money, I said ‘Okay!’” Nillson said.
That’s how the tradition began.
Over the course of the next fifty years, a lot changed.
The two cousins moved apart. Their family got bigger, but one thing remained the same: passing the card back and forth.
“I sent it back to her and we just kept on doing it,” he said. “We didn’t think about it. It was just something that organically happened.”
That was until this past year, when the tradition almost stopped.
“We came out to the Cheesecake Factory to eat and I gave him the card,” said Uptain. “Everything was normal, we finished our meal, and we left. A day or two later, I got this call from a friend of mine, and she said, ‘Have you seen Facebook?’”
David had accidentally left the card in their booth at the Cheesecake Factory.
Luckily, a staff member decided to save it.
“Initially, I kind of thought it looked like a high school yearbook of somebody really popular, but then upon closer inspection, you see that it’s not a bunch of people signing the card for one person, it’s just David and Amy signing the card back and forth to each other,” he said. “Once you got to looking at all the dates, it started to make a lot of sense and you saw the real importance and significance of what this car meant to them.”
Cheesecake Factory manager Britt Long took to Facebook, asking for the public’s help in finding the owners of the card. After more than 600 shares, it finally reached Amy.
“I was thinking we were lucky and we dodged a bullet,” she said. “So, we’re very thankful that they saved it.”
To others, it may look like an outdated card, but when you open it up. You realize it’s something much more special.
“I’m just actually now even more thankful that we didn’t throw that card away so they could keep that tradition going, because I’d hate for a simple mistake like we left it behind at the restaurant to start 50 years’ worth of memories,” Long said. “They’ve probably got a lot more memories to make.”
Since it’s back in the hands of the family again, Amy and David say the tradition will continue for years to come.
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