This past weekend, St. Lawrence welcomed the Alumni Executive Council and Parents Committee members to campus for their winter meetings. Every year, the weekend of these meetings is SLU’s “Winter Weekend,” but this year was unlike all previous years. Winter Weekend featured countless events Friday and Saturday, including an idea crawl and club fair, a winter carnival in the student center, men’s and women’s hockey games, a bonfire, the opening of the new outdoor rink, showings of the movie Frozen in the Winston room, and a Friday night comedian performance. ACE and Thelmo were the driving forces behind this weekend, providing both funding and volunteers.
Colleen Ryan ’15, helped plan Winter Weekend this year. She said that in the past, the Alumni Mocktail event weekend always lined up with the town of Canton’s Winterfest. However, with the academic calendar changes that have occurred in the last year, the two weekends did not line up for the first time. When Student Activities Director Meg Flaherty and Assistant Director Laura Lavoie went to Colleen, they put the idea in her head to do something over the Alumni council weekend.
Colleen started planning Winter Weekend by finding a company that puts on winter weekends. They then contacted her about having inflatable snow globes, which Colleen thought were very unique and exciting. After finding out about this, she put her plans into full swing and found funding through various offices and Thelmo. Colleen wanted to swing it as a community weekend as well, because so many efforts are made to get students into the community, but not as many are made to bring the community to campus. All of the components of Winter Weekend, in particularly the winter carnival on Saturday, were fun for kids, as well as college students. Fliers were sent home to all Canton elementary and middle school families, which drew a lot of kids to campus on Saturday.
So far, there has been a lot of really positive feedback about the weekend. There were many more attendees than initially anticipated by the planning committee, and everyone had fun. In terms of future years, Colleen definitely hopes that this will become a campus tradition, and that it will continue for years to come. “It could definitely be easily run through Thelmo, and could be passed down along with all the other events I help plan,” Colleen said. “Really though, I just hope it will stay as big and successful as it was this year!”