Chinese = party people?!

Yesterday at lunch we were talking about kids of friends who were already at primary school. Seems a lot has changed since I attended. Now the children celebrate each letter at school that they've learned. So there's an "A" day and a "B" day and so on. So I thought: Ok, an average Chinese kid needs to learn 26 letters in the first two weeks of primary school so it can start learning characters, now you need about 4000 characters to be able to read a newspaper. That makes 4026 parties in primary school in contrast to 26 in a Western school. Wow, that's a lot of partying!