As schools across Britain open their gates to an army of excitable Hermiones and Harrys this morning, listen for the collective sigh of relief as parents rejoice that World Book Day (WBD) is over for another year.
It should be a celebration of reading, but just hearing those three little words is enough to make most of us break out in a cold sweat. It is the day in the school calendar that every parent dreads the most.
I am not a perfect Pinterest mum. I am crap at crafts. Every year I urge my twin sons Felix and Harry, 11, to please just go as Horrid Henry because that’s basically scruffy clothes.
The first year I encountered WBD, I was full of foolish optimism. Cake sales and volunteering for the PTA were my thing back then – I thought this would be a breeze.
The theme was animals. A hedgehog darling? No problem. I laughed at supermarket displays of flammable-looking accessories and went home to sew fluffy fabric.
There was literally blood (from the needle stabs), sweat and plenty of tears, but in a stroke of sheer genius, I crafted spikes out of wooden pegs.
As dawn broke and I presented Felix with my efforts, he was not impressed. The spiky bits hurt his bottom when he sat down (my suggestion of crawling on all fours was apparently not allowed). He worried about going to the loo. The pegs kept falling off.
And yet, WBD is a bit like childbirth. After a few months you forget the pain and by the time it rolls around again you think it’s a brilliant idea.
Who wants to waste money on a shop-bought costume that could be better spent on, oh I don’t know, actual books?
I ploughed on. I was never going to create a convincing Dumbledore from an old cardboard box and a couple of yogurt pots, but as they say, God loves a trier. Over the past six years I have cobbled together The Boy In The Dress, Billionaire Boy (David Walliams has a lot to answer for), warriors, witches, wizards, a mad scientist, chimney sweeps and wartime evacuees. I have fashioned cotton wool beards and even stained parchment with cold tea.
I have also refereed heated arguments over whether Nintendo characters are literary (not ever); how much chocolate Willy Wonka can have (less than you think), and whether a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle can pass as a tortoise (definitely yes).
One friend of mine was almost reduced to tears by her son accusing her of being ‘too lazy’ to make a costume from scratch last March. It never occurred to him to ask his dad, of course.
It’s the same story in our house, where WBD Eve is known as ‘the night Mummy loses the plot because Daddy has to “work late”‘, which is only slightly more irritating than Daddy coming home after ‘a quick pint’, painting a stick and being hailed a hero for creating a ‘brilliant wand’.
While nobody would argue with a global push to promote children’s literacy, WBD has descended into annual horror show of competitive costume-making, and almost every parent I know hates it with a passion.
Although 15million £1 book tokens are distributed every March, there has been a growing backlash against the event in recent years, as the pressure falls on parents (and let’s not pretend it is not mostly mums doing the heavy lifting) to come up with a suitably convincing Gruffalo or Matilda.
But it’s not going away, and to make matters worse, this year some schools are urging children to decorate a potato as a book character as well. Yes. A potato. Cue weekends covered in glue and paint, panic-buying googly eyes and dealing with mini meltdowns as your child’s potato Paddington does not even vaguely resemble reality.
My children left primary school this year, so I foolishly believed it was all behind me, but WBD is the monster that will not die.
The boys announced over the weekend that one wants to be Gandalf and the other expects me to conjure up an Oompa Loompa outfit. To be fair to the lad, I do have some pretty unflattering orange foundation, but this year I finally learnt my lesson. I threw money at the problem.
Amazon Prime is your friend in the first week of March people, trust me on this.
Yes, the prices can be eye-watering and the fabric horribly thin, and everyone can tell a mile off that you made precisely zero effort, but the kid gets what the kid wants, and for once the costume actually looks like the character.
The well-known parenting phrase ‘pick your battles’ is used a lot in justification for letting your children get their own way, but in this case it really is worth taking heed.
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source https://metro.co.uk/2020/03/05/world-book-day-12348676/?ITO=squid
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