Today is the day when proud mummies post on social media photos of their offspring dressed up as characters from books. It’s World Book Day. Well, it’s World Book Day in the UK and Ireland where it’s always the first Thursday in March. Elsewhere it’s the 23rd of April but apparently when World Book Day was established back in 1995 someone realised that here it would clash with schools closing for Easter holidays and so we went our own way.
Actually, when you look into it you find that the idea goes back to 1926 when Vicente Clavel, then director of Cervantes publishing house in Barcelona, decided it could be a way of honouring the writer of Don Quijote, Miguel de Cervantes, as well as boosting sales of books. It was first celebrated on 7 October 1926, Cervantes' birthday, before being moved to his death date, 23 April, in 1930. The celebration continues with great popularity in Catalonia, where it is referred to as Sant Jordi's Day (Sant Jordi, by the way, is Catalán for Saint George, a chap who gets around as patron saint of all sorts of places, not just England) or The Day of Books and Roses, when people exchange gifts of, yes, you’ve guessed it, books and roses!
The 23rd of April is also the anniversary of the death of Shakespeare, the same date but not actually the same day as Cervantes as back then Spain and Britain worked on different calendars, but a convenient enough coincidence for UNESCO to declare it the date of World Book Day also known as World Book and Copyright Day or International Day of the Book.
As far as I have been able to find out, dressing up was part of the day right from its UNESCO inauguration. When we started taking part here, I read that every child was given a £1 voucher towards buying a book. That wouldn’t go far towards buying a book now. There was then a move towards producing special £1 books for children. Goodness knows whether that continues nowadays.
Some mummies, of course, do not post photos as they don’t allow photos of their offspring to go out into the public domain. Fair enough! Some mummies also dress their children up as characters from books children are unlikely to have heard of, let alone read: Agatha Christie characters or ladies from “The Thursday Murder Club”.
It has always seemed to me that dressing up your tiny baby, under one year old, as a character from a book is more fun for the mother than for the baby. Most babies of that age don’t notice what they are wearing so long as they are comfortable. (Having said that, our daughter expressed preferences as soon as she was able to put two words together: at 18 months old tugging at the pretty dress a doting grandparent had given us and declaring, “No, not a dress!”) At two years old, however, having had stories read to them since they more or less from birth, our smallest grandchildren understood the idea of dressing up and would choose a favourite character, leading to some interesting costume invention.
Granddaughter Number Four’s school this year has opted to have children turn a wooden spoon into a favourite book character. This seems to me to be an excellent idea as children can take a more active part in the creative process. Well, at any rate children like our seven year old can do so.
On the downside, new research has shown that more than a third of children in the UK cannot choose what they want to read, and one in five feel judged for what they do read.
“Children have told us that they think that reading choices are judged by the adults around them,” said Cassie Chadderton, CEO of World Book Day. “It discourages them, it puts them off reading for pleasure and by choice”.
The survey of 1,000 7- to 14-year-olds in the UK – conducted by consultancy Beano Brain in January – also asked children about their parents’ hobbies. Only 25% of children said their parents relax by reading at home, while 56% said their parents scroll on their phones and 52% watch TV. “Adults usually tell you to read, but then they go on their phones,” one 11-year-old “non-reader” told researchers. “My teachers and my dad do that!” There you go!
Then there’s the matter of libraries (which I have been praising in a recent blogpost). It seems that there is not a statutory requirement for schools to have a library. One in seven primary schools don’t, rising to one in four in disadvantaged areas. How do you develop a love of reading if you don’t have free access to books. One expert (I really don’t know who) said this:
“At school they may have certain books that they’ve got to read,” whereas the library is “about the child really discovering its own interests”.
So children shouldn’t be criticised for what they choose to read, as our Grandson Number One once was for taking a factual book rather than fiction for a free-reading session at school.
Still on books, I read the other day that a school district somewhere in the USA has removed “To Kill a Mockingbird” from its schools’ reading list, because it “makes people uncomfortable”! Of course, it’s just possible that the book was meant to make people feel uncomfortable.
Meanwhile, our very own bookworm, 20 year old Granddaughter Number Two, is currently enjoying “Jane Eyre”, sending us messages about how much she is enjoying it. Now ai need to find our copy of “Wide Sargasso Sea” by Jean Rhys, so that she can read the story from the viewpoint of the “mad woman in the attic”.
Keep on reading!
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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