Traditions
Over the years, Princeton Day School enjoyed many traditions that no longer take place. These include an Upper School pie-eating competition that continued until the eighties, an annual sophomore-junior canoeing trip, intended to bridge the gap between two grades that traditionally do not share many classes, and legendary English teacher Anne Shepherd's wreathmaking assembly. The wreathmaking rite started in Miss Fine's School in 1900, and since, by the 1980s, participation in the event had dwindled, it was cancelled. A December 1982 article in PDS's student-run newspaper, the The Spokesman, explained that “This raised such an uproar that, by popular demand, the was given one last chance.” By the 1990s, though, wreathmaking was gone, indicative of the passing of certain traditions over time. (Another tradition that began at Miss Fine's, the annual Maypole Dance, actually continues today, though it is now performed by second graders instead of Upper Schoolers.)
New traditions have joined the Maypole Dance in recent years, including the annual Powder Puff game, a fiercely competitive flag football match between the junior and senior girls that has been held since 2004, and Dr. Seuss Day, a day of boisterous noise and frosted cake in the otherwise tightly-run Upper School library. Two of PDS's most celebrated current traditions are the Halloween Parade, and Blue & White Day.
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Famous quotes containing the word traditions:
“But generally speaking philistinism presupposes a certain advanced state of civilization where throughout the ages certain traditions have accumulated in a heap and have started to stink.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“... the more we recruit from immigrants who bring no personal traditions with them, the more America is going to ignore the things of the spirit. No one whose consuming desire is either for food or for motor-cars is going to care about culture, or even know what it is.”
—Katharine Fullerton Gerould (1879–1944)
“And all the great traditions of the Past
They saw reflected in the coming time.
And thus forever with reverted look
The mystic volume of the world they read,
Spelling it backward, like a Hebrew book,
Till life became a Legend of the Dead.”
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1809–1882)