With ladders, duct tape, and almost no sleep, student council members, royalty, and volunteers spent the entire weekend transforming the school in preparation for Swine Week.
Every year, students look forward to Swine Week, a week-long school event filled with energetic activities, competitions and school spirit. Before the excitement begins, there is an entire weekend dedicated to transforming the school into a sea of decorations, with those involved barely sleeping the entire time.
This year, the decorating lasted from Friday after school until 4 a.m. on Monday, and it was packed with teamwork. Swine Week not only raises money for charity, but it also helps Edmond Memorial come together and grow as a community.
This past weekend was crazy. Student council members and a few volunteers, such as myself, gathered in the halls after seventh hour on Friday. We immediately began wrapping walls with colored paper, taping up posters and painting the paper that we put up on the walls of the Freshman Academy. We worked through the night, only sleeping at 1 a.m., but we made significant progress.
However, Saturday began on a difficult note. The main wall segment of the blacklight hallway fell to the floor, so we had to put it back up, which threw us off schedule. Saturday was probably the busiest day of the whole weekend.
Decorating took forever, and it felt like we were spending hours finishing the smallest tasks, but the music and the coordination between the groups of people working made the experience enjoyable.
From spending hours on a ladder taping decorations to the ceiling to tearing the skin off my finger from all the tearing of duct tape, the part that seemed to take the longest was the cafeteria. We had to measure different lengths of paper that would reach from the upper commons to the lower commons, which took hours by itself.
Sunday was a blur, a group of sleep-deprived kids at school decorating their hearts out. By the time we finished with the decorations, it was already around 3 a.m. on Monday. I was tired in a way that I did not even know was possible, but I was also proud of how much we had accomplished. The school looked nothing like it had on Friday. All the walls were filled with decorations, and nothing looked the same.
The final walkthrough was at 4 a.m. Monday morning. Everything that we had worked on was finally complete, and the school looked incredible. Walking through the halls and taking everything in, I realized just how much work we put in throughout the past three days.
After the weekend was all said and done, it will probably be my favorite memory of high school. The experience was worth it to me because I could see everyone’s reactions to the decorations during the week.
Contact Wes Matlock at [email protected]
