I don't want all birthday notifications, only on family and friends.

I keep getting notification of all my 1000 contacts. since I use my private phone at work, I have lots of contacts, some are from a previous sync from linked in and outlook, but there is no sync from my app to any service now other than Apple, anyhow in my contacts app, I have deleted all birthdays info from contacts I don't want to be reminded of. My problem is that they do appear again, even after I delete them. WHY THE F#$% H"#$%$ do they come back, after deleted 950 birthdays manually in contacts 3 times, I do realize I don't have the mental capacity to fix this myself.

Apple used to be user friendly, but no longer... I am a user of Apple products, but I can't figure this out.

I want the birthday calendar to stay, and get notification on real friends and family only.

Do I need to delete the contacts to get rid of this notification **** ?