It's getting so you can't do anything these days without someone trying to sell you a means of celebrating it. I wouldn't be surprised to walk into the local drugstore and find a rack of musical "Congratulations on your mortgage default" cards.

(They play "Movin' Out" by Billy Joel. Hallmark is working on a card for people whose homes are now worth less than they owe on their mortgages; that one plays "Yellow Submarine.")

One of my pet peeves for a long time now is how extravagantly people blow money they don't necessarily have on weddings. Considering how high the divorce rate is, something a little more low-key might be more appropriate - say, a potluck brunch in a Comfort Inn meeting room.

But no, we're going the other way. In addition to overspending on elaborate wedding celebrations, we can now also overspend on elaborate parties to celebrate ... divorce.

Apparently the traditional crying jag, weekend bender, tattoo or trip abroad to acquire a tan and an STD aren't quite hitting the spot anymore. The newly unmarried are throwing parties - and what's a party without a cake?

A baker in England sells fancy, multitiered wedding-style cakes with a little bride and groom on the top, delicately crafted of icing and doing terrible things to each other. Good taste? Better: Tastes good.

Pictures in the U.K.'s Daily Mail show beautifully decorated cakes atop which a bride pushes her groom off the top tier or stabs him in the back. There's one where a bride hangs on desperately to the upper tier as the groom stands on the lower one and pushes her off the cake.

(What really makes that one is the dainty little white icing shoe that has fallen, Cinderella-style, from the bride's foot.)

The creator of all this jollity is Fay Millar, a 31-year-old mother of two who sells the cakes for £60 to £800, the amount of weight you'll gain if you don't invite any party guests and just eat the cake over the sink by yourself while crying. (Sixty to 800 British pounds is equivalent to $99 to $1,319 -- all the money you may actually have left after a divorce.)

"I like to introduce humor rather than something too sober or vindictive," Ms. Millar told the Daily Mail, because nothing says "not vindictive" like a dagger-wielding woman atop a pool of red icing.

Ms. Millar, owner of Pink Rose Cakes in Brighton, England, is capitalizing on the rising popularity of divorce parties in the United Kingdom. The trend has crossed the Atlantic from - where else? - the United States.

"I think people are definitely coming round to the idea of shouting to the world that they are back on the market," she said.

Hooray! Yes, you're back on the market, stronger than ever, and what could be a better advertisement to send to potential new partners than the image of you gleefully pushing someone you once vowed to love off a cliff?

There are some occasions that it's just unseemly (ah, there's a word you don't hear anymore) to celebrate ostentatiously. No matter how big a pain your judgmental, passive-aggressive hypochondriac great-aunt was, no matter how drunk and incontinent she got at Christmas last year and no matter, even, how much money the old warhorse inexplicably left you, you shouldn't celebrate her long-overdue demise with a 200-guest disco pool party and pig roast.

(A simple spa day with your closest friends, including a solemn champagne toast to the old girl's eternal silence, is sendoff enough.)

However profound your relief and joy, sometimes restraint is the most prudent course. Still, this is an era of excess, and far be it from me to deny people an excuse for a party. Let them eat cake.

Just don't invite your divorce lawyer unless you want to watch someone halve your cake - and eat it, too.

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