Splash your friends!

Splish Splash. It’s National Step in a Puddle and Splash Your Friends Day on January 11. Read how one Friend associated this day of recognition with her childhood adventures in the library.

Image courtesy of Unsplash

Perusing the 2024 very complete calendar of holiday listings, I discovered that January 11 is U.S. “Step in a Puddle and Splash Your Friends Day.” Insofar as I can tell, it’s an idea first published in Anita Silvey’s 2011 “Children’s Book-a-Day Almanac.” Silvey is an established author and literary critic of children’s literature. And that’s appropriate because – especially for a child – the plunge into reading is as exciting and empowering as jumping into the recommended puddle. 

But most importantly for childhood me, the holiday has a slightly subversive air. The adult world does not allow its members the freedom to stamp in puddles and splash friends or, put another way, adults are long removed from the innocence that makes it an act of pure, joyous independence.  And when I sought that independence as a child, there was no better place to do it than the library. 

For one thing, there was the trip to the main branch of the Free Library of Philadelphia itself. I was allowed to walk there alone, and I reached the door to the children’s section by way of a sunken courtyard not unlike one in a children’s book. And then I plunged into adventure through the books inside. I was always on the lookout for undertakings free of adult interference – where the adults in the plot were otherwise occupied, or clueless, or missing.    

Books with magic worked particularly well to liberate me from the structures of the adult world. There was Edward Eager’s Half Magic, where the kids find not a wardrobe but an ancient coin that grants exactly half of what they wish for. Interestingly, as Mr. Eager’s series extended, it examined “magic” from various angles. In the final book, it was a subtle phenomenon filtered through the mind of the beholder. Feh. I was not interested in adult subtlety.

There was Edward Ormondroyd’s Time at the Top, where the heroine takes the apartment building elevator to a suddenly appeared extra top floor of their building where it’s 1880. “Only three times now!” says the old lady she comes across at the outset of the story – and by the end of the third excursion, our heroine has persuaded her dad to up and move her to the past, leaving behind (if memory serves) a really mean stepmom. 

There are many other books I found liberating and energizing. But as one grows to adulthood, the locus of control shifts, or at least, methods of empowerment change. And no one could really celebrate “Step in a Puddle and Splash Your Friends Day” in Chicago on January 11 anyway.

Yet, no matter what Ms. Silvey originally intended by her suggestion, to me the name celebrates the reading adventures the library offers young patrons, and the delight children find in those swashbuckling excursions. So, take a kid to the library this January 11, let them find a book, and watch them plunge right in!

— Lee Price
Communications Committee
Friends of the Edgewater Library