Having just experienced my first illustrious Winter Carnival, I might be expected to conclude the weekend singing the praises of the Big Green, winter fun and the traditions I'll remember for a lifetime. Yet sitting here on this February day, I have mainly one feeling: disappointment.
Don't get me wrong; it was a pretty good weekend. I saw the lines at the Polar Bear swim, watched the human dogsled races on the Green, worked on the sculpture and went out on Occom pond. While these are all nice traditions, I feel like they have little to do with what Winter Carnival actually means to most students.
Today, my friend started talking to me about our first Winter Carnival. I asked her how hers was. Her response: "Very Winter Carnival-y." I inquired further, sensing from her coy grin what this phrase actually meant. To my friend, and I think to most on campus, having a Winter Carnival-y time meant getting drunk. Very drunk.
I should qualify that this isn't necessarily the attitude of everyone on campus, but I think it is safe to say that, to many, Winter Carnival has lost much of its former grandeur. It has become a post-midterm escapist reprieve: in short, an extra night to get wasted. A simple listen around campus this weekend revealed what Carnival traditions really seem important to students. Moans of "way too much," "completely blacked out" and "totally booted all up in FoCo's bathroom" were heard around every corner, while talk of bonding, love of the outdoors and "Carnival spirit" was suspiciously absent.
A look at Friday's Winter Carnival issue of The Dartmouth also yields evidence of the decline of a once-great tradition. One article's headline read "Upper Valley residents lament loss of Carnival spirit." The essence of the piece can be summed up in the words of one Lebanon resident quoted in the article: "[Carnival] used to be one of the highlights of the winter ... Now, not so much."
Other articles speak of Carnival once being a "magical" event that reporters from around the country would come to cover. One article told tales of past snow sculptures; another of crazy bygone traditions.
Clearly some of the old customs faded away for good reasons. Sexist pageants and some of the "Animal House" behavior should never make a comeback. And while I would absolutely love to see drunken frat brothers trying to jump over empty kegs, I accept why the College put that particular event to rest. In fact, aside from a few obviously outdated or dangerous traditions, a lot of what once made Winter Carnival so great still exists -- ski races, skating on Occom Pond, snow sculpture building. So what's missing? What has changed?
Drinking heavily has been, and probably always will be, a part of Winter Carnival. It's freezing up here and we're college kids; of course we're going to get drunk on a weekend with the word "carnival" in its title. However, though the appearance of the activity hasn't changed, I think something deeper about it has. I submit that, as time has passed, our reason for drinking has been corrupted.
Our culture has become progressively more obsessed with "success." We're all so caught up in figuring out how and why to get started on whatever life path has been tossed on us, that it's no wonder we drink ourselves numb when given the chance. Merrymakers of the Carnivals of old, perhaps because they were products of a nepotistic and elitist system, simply weren't as stressed out, so they drank for the fun of it. Today, we focused, hardworking, 21st century students use weekends like Carnival as an excuse to shrug off our anxiety and forget how hard we work.
And it isn't just Carnival; for many here, it's most weekends. We see it all the time, recognize it as a problem and neglect to act. We've traded our school spirit in favor of drinking away stress. I'm not saying we should do away with drinking at Carnival, or even in general. I just think that to get back to what big weekends were once about, we need to reexamine why we choose to drink so heavily. We need to remember why Carnival weekend (and yes, drinking heartily) became so ingrained in Dartmouth culture -- not drink so heartily that we can't remember why we're here.
