North Alabama restaurant reunites family with birthday card filled with 50 years’ worth of signatures

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. (WHNT) — For a lot of people, a birthday card might have a sweet message, a little bit of cash on the inside, and then it will end up in the trash or tucked away in a drawer somewhere. 

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, and I did not think anything about it,” Amy Uptain said.

Flashforward 10 months later, it was Uptain’s birthday, so Nillson decided to return the favor and follow the directions in the card. 

“Being a 16-year-old with no money, I said ‘OK,'” Nillson said.

That’s how the tradition staretd. 

Over the course of the next 50 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,” Nillson 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,” Uptain said. “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?'”

Nillson 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,” said Cheesecake Factory manager Britt Long. “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 card meant to them.”

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,” Uptain 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,” Long said. “Because I’d hate for a simple mistake like we left it behind at the restaurant to start 50 years’ worth of memories. They’ve probably got a lot more memories to make.”

Because it’s back in the hands of the family again, Uptain and Nillson said the tradition will continue for years to come.