Thursday, January 19, 2006

You Say "Pajama", I Say "Pyjama"

Today was Pajama Day at Emily and Lauren's school. All the children (including E & L) went to school in their pyjamas and dressing gowns. (By the way -- I hadn't realised, until we moved here, that the spelling "pyjama" is peculiar to Britain. It seems that the rest of the world says "pajama".)

In England, almost all schools have uniforms. The schools my girls attended regularly had non-uniform days. These were fund-raising events, wherein children pay a small fee (50p or so) to be allowed to go to school in their ordinary clothes. As their current school does not have a uniform, such fundraising opportunities are not open to them.

The pajama day, however, is not a fundraising event, but an anniversary celebration. Around this time last year, many teachers and about 300 children had to sleep the night at the school because the roads were too icy to be passable.

7 comments:

Michael said...

Some US high schools also have "pajama days" during spirit week, the week before the big homecoming game (football and/or basketball). They have dress up days every day of the week leading up to the game. This is one of the more fun school traditions in my opinion.

Michael Pahl said...

We say "pyjama" in Canada, although I don't know if that's universal across Canada or if that's another of our optional spellings where we can't make up our minds to follow the British or the Americans.

Anonymous said...

We always follow the British spelling, speaking English rather than American. Pyjamas are pyjamas, we don't say pajamas ...in New Zealand.

Lorraine said...

My daughter's school (which does have uniforms) has a pajama day during Spirit Week and they spend most of the day lounging around an reading. It's pretty sweet that your girls' school does it as an anniversary...that must have been quite an adventure for those originally involved!

Viola said...

I tried googling for info. on Spirit Week. I found out that it's a week of fun activities, but not much more than that. Please can you expain what it is? Thanks.

Anonymous said...

This is not about Spirit Week, but here's a link to what happened last year: http://www.wral.com/news/4121892/detail.html
You will learn that North Carolinians are not used to snow, and that the weather can give you a LOT to talk about. We have had unusually warm weather recently, but the day we moved here 6 years ago, it was about 70 degrees. Two weeks later we were hit with about 22 inches of snow! Everything was closed for at least a week!

Viola said...

Thanks for the link, Ren. We have had such good weather since we've been here (wearing T-shirts in January) that it's funny to see it all covered in snow and ice.