Authentically GDS: A Long History of Celebrating

GDS’s traditions are rooted in the idea that celebrating together, particularly each other’s religious holidays, was a way for children to learn empathy, respect, and to better understand and appreciate difference and diversity. It also builds community.

First Head of School Aggie O’Neil explained that a central part of GDS’s original mission was in helping children to try to understand each other, and she believed the best way to achieve that was through “the participation in each other’s days of joy.”

From its earliest days, GDS’s founders insisted that those religious days of joy would be commemorated authentically. The celebrations would emphasize not the parochialism of those holy days, but their universality.

As Gladys Stern, GDS’s third Head of School, put it: “At GDS we encourage a formal feeling of respect for the beliefs and values represented in our student body. The celebrations of Christmas, Passover, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday express universal messages of peace, freedom, and the dignity of the human spirit.”

Former Associate Head of School Kevin Barr describes a moment he witnessed that best demonstrates this idea at work. During a High School Christmas Festival, students were singing Go Tell It on the Mountain from a balcony. Looking up, he saw one of the children in the a cappella group “...wearing his tallit and singing with great gusto; he was happy to be singing about Jesus and proudly claiming his own religious identity, all at the same time.” 

At first, not all the parents were comfortable with this approach to religious inclusion. Founding parent and first Board Chair Philleo Nash shared an incident in which a parent wanted to know when they were going to dispense with all of the religious stuff, declaring themselves a “free thinker” and claiming to be speaking on behalf of the other freethinking parents. Philleo thought for a while and then responded, “You may not realize it, but we have a very, very carefully designed program, which includes something for everybody. For the free thinkers, we celebrate Halloween.”

Halloween was just one of the secular celebrations they included among the school’s traditions alongside the religious ones; a couple others were Kite Day and Field Day.

“We had parties, prizes and a Halloween parade,” said Edith Nash, Philleo’s wife and GDS’s second Head of School. “Most children made their own costumes and one could impersonate whomever one wanted. One time Shari Belafonte came as Harry Belafonte. One boy put a hollowed pumpkin over his head and came as a pumpkin. And we celebrated Japanese kite day on a windy day in spring. The children used to design and build their own kites and parents came to help. In the high school, I remember an international food bazaar with language classes preparing national foods.” 

As time passed, several other notable celebrations were added, including the Free to Be Me Assembly at the Lower School and the Pride assemblies at the Middle School and High School, reflecting one of our school’s core values in encouraging students and staff to be their authentic selves. 

These traditional celebrations have proved tried and true in the practice of creating joy, community, and a shared understanding, and many have remained with us for 80 years.