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“Yeah so every year, I think this is a pretty widely common thing in high schools in like America but like when you’re a senior there will be a day where everybody skips class and it’s called senior skip day. For us, like the high school I went to, it’s pretty much become a tradition where every year the senior class will like meet up and we’ll drink and pregame and all that and then all of us will go to the beach and like hang out for the day. Just like everybody in the class or like anybody that wants to go so like it’s open to everyone and I mean like everybody gets into it because it’s the last few like moments you’re sharing as a group you know. So, yeah, that’s one of the more special traditions I’d say from my high school.”

Context
AV says that senior skip day is a very common and well known tradition among high school seniors in America, and notes that all his friends in college, his siblings, and his high school friends from other schools participated in their own senior skip days at their respective high schools. AV says that at his high school, their specific tradition of drinking and going to the beach as a large group was well known from year to year and nobody really deviated from it. He doesn’t know when it started, but he says a few years later, kids are still doing it now and everybody gets into it.

Analysis
Senior skip day is a piece of customary folklore, a yearly tradition that is widespread throughout American high schools, yet is given its own unique spin by each specific school and student body. It’s a great example of how school lore passes horizontally through students rather than vertically from the institution. It’s a tradition that plays on liminality and communitas, as normal school rules are void (and the school doesn’t mind) and the entire student body is together in experiencing this tradition. For AV’s school specifically, skip day has almost become a festival that marks the end of high school and the social bonds as a graduating class, and according to Santino, intertwines the playfulness of festivals while still marking that transition past high school. Skip day is also a great example of how lore passes down as even though it’s not an official tradition of the school, the same event has been and will continue to be passed from senior class to senior class.