‘Dear parents, a reminder that we are dressing up for World Book Day! Don’t forget your child should come to school in costume as their favourite character tomorrow…’
It’s the email every parent dreads receiving. (Or one of them, anyway.) It tends to be opened at eight o’clock the evening before World Book Day, to be met with feelings of exasperation, desperation and guilt.
Dressing up is, in fact, the antithesis to reading for pleasure
How is it that the charity World Book Day, founded by Unesco in 1995 with the laudable mission ‘to promote reading for pleasure’, has morphed into yet another occasion for parents to buy stuff? An unscientific survey of parents I know revealed that almost all of them are too busy and/or too broke to see World Book Day costumes as anything other than the last thing they need. Mothers desperately draw Harry Potter scars on their sons’ foreheads or struggle to create Pippi Longstocking plaits.
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