Snow Sculpture 2017: A Minimalist Perspective

By Grace Miller | 1/19/17 10:00am

Breaking: Dartmouth students angry because the making of that thing they didn’t want to participate in is being taken away from them! This past Friday we all opened our blitz to some expected earth-shattering news: The Winter Carnival snow sculpture has been cancelled due to, among other reasons, “declining involvement from the student body at large.” (Ooh, drag me, Winter Carnival committee.) This ultimately resulted in some strongly worded grumbles like “what will we Instagram Week Six?” and “Lest the old traditions fail, etc., etc.”

<p>After an unusually warm day, the majority of the snow melted on the Green.</p>

Wow, the snow sculpture looks so good!
Courtesy of collegeplanningadvisors.com

However, if I learned anything from that one art history class I took freshman fall, it is that “art is in the eye of the beholder.” Perhaps, the best snow sculpture we could have, is “NO snow sculpture”?? Before you turn up your philistine nose, humor me on what our lack of a snow sculpture just might be for this year’s Harry Potter-themed Big Weekend:

1. Harry Potter and the gang all under their invisibility cloak

2. All of the friends Harry had before he went to Hogwarts

3. The love shared by Harry, Hermione and Ron!

4. An Accio! charm to summon Academic Rigor back to Dartmouth

5. A Wingardium Leviosa! charm so that we can all “get lyfted” over Winter Carnival

Courtesy of Warner Brothers via Pinterest

6. A Lumos spell since it’s gonna be #lit

7. Moral justice when Voldemort died

8. The sexual tension between Ron and Hermione

9. 100 points taken from Dartmouth

10. All of the fucks Dumbledore gives about a valid house point system

11. That moment between when the phoenix dies and it comes back to life

12. The nostalgia you feel when you remember watching Potter Puppet Pals in middle school

13. The zeros missing from J.K. Rowling’s net-worth after she dropped off Forbes billionaire list by giving money to charity

14. Voldemort’s horcruxes that are really really well hidden

15. The emotional trauma created when Dobby died

16. Our true wishes when we look into the Mirror of Erised

17. Draco Malfoy’s deep-set insecurities that cause him to lash out at others

Courtesy of Warner Brothers via giphy.com

18. All of the people dressed in green to make books float in the movies

19. The lack of people of color in any of the Harry Potter movies (except perhaps Prisoner of Azkaban?)

20. Dartmouth’s Patronus, which happens to be nothingness, just like our souls

21. The magic in all of us!

22. The hole left in Harry Potter’s life when his parents died

23. The emptiness of fame all of the child actors in Harry Potter developed as they grew older

24. A cosmic representation that we all die alone

25. Your own mortality

26. Nihilism

27. The real snow sculpture was friendship, and it was inside all of us the entire time!


Grace Miller