Dressing to Impress

Maclay School’s Homecoming Week Dress-up Themes Are Overdone

Photo by Kayleigh Mitchell/Maclay Andalusian

Maclay’s annual Homecoming week is something upper school students look forward to each year. However, time and time again they are disappointed by the dress-down themes. The week consists of dress-down days with themes, break games and homecoming court nominations and ends with a dance on Saturday. This year’s themes were Pajama Day, Decades Day, Wacky Wednesday, favorite Disney character and Spirit Day. However, upper school students lack school spirit and participation during Homecoming week dress-down days because most students prefer to wear comfortable clothing. This is likely because the themes are basic, and many students find them to be boring or repetitive.

Every year, all five themes seem redundant. Most students enjoy Pajama Day and Spirit Day, so it is understandable why those two are always repeated. However, themes like Wacky Wednesday and Decades Day are often repeated throughout the year for dress-down days; fewer students participate yearly. Instead of having the same themes every year Maclay should start to incorporate unique and simple themes that haven’t been used before. Multiple Homecoming themes are easy and creative, such as Twin Day, Glitter Day, holiday themes and more. Most of these themes can be easily executed. For Twin Day, students can easily gather similar pieces of clothing from their closets and makeshift matching outfits with their friends. For glitter day, students can wear fun sequins and face glitter. Dressing as your favorite holiday could be done in a variety of ways such as colors, pajamas or even holiday decorations.

Incorporating creative themes that are not overdone might help to motivate more upper schoolers to participate. It also helps if students have easy access to the materials and clothing needed. Oftentimes, students tend to use Homecoming dress-down days to their own advantage instead of following through with the themes. If themes were more unique, students would be more excited to show off funny costumes and participate all together instead of dressing down.

However, the problem with homecoming themes is they have to be inclusive to the whole school. Maclay’s Key Club staff must come up with themes the lower, middle and upper schoolers are all capable of doing. Though this can be difficult, there are still many themes like camouflage, ancient Greece, future job day and so much more that are still easy and inclusive to younger kids. 

Overall, if Maclay got creative and switched up their homecoming dress-up themes more students would participate. Having more students involved would make the dress-up days more fun altogether.