Many people associate winter with things like the holidays, snow, and bundling up. But for students, winter marks a time for a newfound hope of getting days off of school. A lot of time is spent refreshing weather sites and watching the news on nights when weather looks bad. Everyone wants to wake up one morning to find “West Bloomfield School District – Closed” scrolling across the T.V. and getting the official phone call from the school. Students will do anything we can to make sure that happens.

While growing up, there were many different rituals to do the night before to ensure a snow day. These snow day rituals range from flushing ice cubes down the toilet to repeating a “snow chant.” One of the most common and easy procedures is wearing your pajamas inside out that night for bed.

“Whenever it snows a lot, I always wear my PJs inside out,” says fourth grader Ysabella Macalino.

Other rituals include sleeping on opposite ends of the bed, keeping a wooden spoon underneath your pillow, and running around a table five times. Although many do not make sense, snow day rituals are fun and a part of going to school in Michigan during the winter time.

As we grow older, we begin to grow out of these silly rituals, but the hope and desire for a snow day never goes away. Junior Arhum Mahmood says, “I try not to think about the snow day because I feel like it helped the chances.”

If there is any chance of a snow day, there is a large chance everyone is turning to social media sites like Twitter and Facebook to talk about it. Scrolling down a twitter timeline, most tweets are prayers to the snow gods, promises of clean rooms and finished homework in exchange for a day off, and even tweets to the vice principal for updates and/or confirmation about the possible snow day.

Mother Nature must have heard our snow chants and appreciated all the ice cubes going down the drain this year because West Bloomfield had five consecutive snow days between January 2nd and January 8th because of extreme temperatures and bad road conditions. At the beginning of 2014, the United States hit the lowest temperatures it has experienced in the past twenty years. In Michigan, the temperatures during that week never went above zero degrees.