World Book Day costumes: fun for children, horror for parents

For the last four World Book Days, my daughter has gone to school dressed as Alice. This is not because she particularly likes the Alice books. In fact, she hasn’t read the Alice books. It’s because I am a terrible parent and every year I forget about World Book Day until my daughter walks out of the front door in her usual uniform, spots her classmates spilling down the street in Paddington duffels and Where’s Wally? bretons, turns tail and demands I rectify my terrible oversight. And every year I do so with a blue pinafore, a jar with “Drink me” hastily scribbled onto it, a white Miffy the rabbit and a headband. Alice. Done.

My children tolerate this lackadaisical approach to dressing up because neither of them like it that much. There has never been much demand for me to create effigies in papier-maché and homestitched felt. Early in my parental career, when it still seemed important to make an obvious effort, my son’s preparations for his first World Book Day mostly involved him bargaining me down till I’d agreed to a costume that he could play football in. In the end, he was Charlie from Charlie and Lola: a normal boy in normal jeans and a normal sweatshirt, on which he permitted me to ink a meticulous serif C in fabric pen. This was my greatest success until the year he got a tiger onesie and realised he could roll straight out of bed and off to school as a Winnie-the-Pooh character without even getting changed.

Of course not every child is lucky enough to have a parent as supportive as me. Some mums and dads insist on trying, and apparently some children are reckless enough to encourage them, judging by the joyful tiny faces that you’ll see on Thursday morning peeping out from elaborate outfits. There’s still a minor sheen of snobbery around the store-bought outfit – the box-fresh Harry Potters and the satin-stitched Disney princesses bespeaking cash-rich time-poor parents (or rather mothers, since it’s usually mothers who have to soak this up) who just won’t make the effort to build a bespoke Iron Giant exoskeleton for their apparently-not-that-loved-after-all little darling. My resentment on this point, however, really stems from my own incompetence and the fact that I secretly think anyone who is organised enough to get to the shop is probably cheating.

And when the real DIY marvels show up, I start to get very bitter indeed. Who are these people who apparently live to make me look bad? I’m looking at you, the parents who conjure up matching red bodystockings and blue wigs to turn their twins into Thing One and Thing Two (having had the wherewithal to plan their theme years in advance by producing twins in the first place); the people who put in long hours painting patchwork panels of cardboard to turn their child into an Elmer (so they can become gaudy sludge on a wet walk home); the ones who have constructed a precise replica of Katniss Everdeen’s bow, so their child can slaughter the school guinea pig and kick off a revolt against the head at breaktime.

All of you are showing me up with your craft and joy and creativity, and you must be derided for it. Or, alternatively, defeated. This year, then, I’m going to go big for my daughter. Lyra Belacqua, with functioning airship and animatronic bear companion. Too-Ticky, one of the connoisseur’s Moomin characters, with a portable cast of invisible shrews. Gregor Samsa after a heavy night (mobility might be a problem, but at least I could spare her carrying her snack fruit by embedding it in a sensitive spot on her cardboard back).

Or: Alice again. Done.