Day 7. UK World Book Day celebration whatever that means! #SOL19 #SOLSC

March 7th:

Yesterday I received a whatsapp from my friend and colleague Marie asking me if I wanted to celebrate World Book Day today at the school where I used to be the head librarian. Since now I work at home, I always look for opportunities that force me to get out, and reply with an immediate yes! without thinking too much. Then I was, wait! World Book Day? Isn´t that in April? I got lost. What book celebration was today that I was not aware of? I remembered Read Across America, but that´s on March 2nd, and is American not worldwide.

Doing a little bit of research I realized that British people celebrate World Book Day not like everybody else in April by the first Thursday of March. April is already packed in the UK with Easter school holidays, and April 23rd was already taken by Saint George´s Day, the national saint of England.

Many of the teachers in the school are from the UK, so they decided to celebrate UK style World Book Day with the Spanish children. Always is a good occasion to get on a costume of your favorite book character and share your special book with friends and teachers. In England, The Guardian has a post today called Show us your World Book Day costumes where people could upload photos and tell a story about the process of deciding which character they were going to be and the making of their costumes. Here are some of the stories.

This is my story in bullet points:

• I only had 24 hours to decide what to be and how to do it
• I had a Cat and a hat outfit and would have been easy to just do that since I knew the drill of the make up. But, Dr. Seuss is under scrutiny in the US, and I didn´t want to represent values of racism whether they were known here or not.
• I had a dress I bought in Istanbul last year that I wanted to use for storytelling I hadn´t being able to use it yet. I really wanted to use it.
• I started googling “book characters with red and yellow costumes”
• I saw medieval princesses, some sort of little red riding hoods…but nothing well known or that ringed my bell.
• My dress was a regal dress…but I couldnt be a princess. I needed to be some sort of queen…Voilá! The Queen of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland!
• When I started to look for images of the Queen I found many of the Disney´s version and the last one of Tim Burton´s movie.
• I decided to have my own version, a mix of the original 154 years old Queen of Heart combined with the latest Burton´s version.
• For the makeup I found a great and useful youtube video . The outcomes probably will be much better on a young and beautiful person than myself.
• Using cheap makeup doesn´t enhance your pretty old features. The results were like a monster or an old granny that could scare children. I thought I was going to tell children I was the Grandmother of the Queen of Heart.

• I found a template for a crown, and an old wig my daughter left when she moved back to the US. My husband lend me an old golf club and I cut out a flamingo to play croquet.
• If nothing work, I was just going to yell Off with their heads! and everything was going to be solved.

• My husband took a video of the Queen in action that by popular demand I have to post on my Instagram feeds. He also dropped the Queen off at the school.
• Nobody wanted to give a kiss to the Queen of Hearts, not because they were going to messed up her makeup (How thoughtful she thought) but because they didn´t want to get the white thing on their own face.
• We had a blast

The Queen of Hearts, the Cat in the Hat, Oliver Twist and the Tiger that came to Tea

Even the Principal humored us with Zorro.

Even the Principal humored us with Zorro.

The Queen of Heart with One of her Latest favorite books, “El Arenque Rojo” by Gonzalo Moure

The Queen of Heart found the rabbit

The Queen of Hearts and Oliver Twist

The Queen of Heart holding her own book

When the Queen of Hearts realized she was actually the grandmother of the real Queen of Heart

• I return home biking with all the Queen of Hearts belongings hanging on my back.
• The end

Happy world Book Day, any date you celebrate it!

PS: Today´s slice was hard to write. It will be published 5 minutes before midnight my time.