Halloween fell on a Saturday this year, so Carleton students went all out to make sure it was a Halloween to remember.
Halloween weekend was so chock-full of activities that the Campus Activities office published a schedule so busy students could plan their partying out in their Lagniappe. The festivities started Friday, when spiders and cobwebs started popping up in the most unusual of places in Sayles Hill. Campus Activities held a guess-how-many-candy-corn-in-the-big-glass-jar contest all day. (By the way, there were 1,512 of them.) Friday evening, couples on screwdate Set Up Your Roommate dates could enjoy getting shrieked at in the Haunted Arb Walk.
The night of Halloween proper started off with the annual Trick or Treat for Canned Goods. This event organized by Mortar Board has become an annual tradition. Students go into the Northfield community and instead of asking for candy, they ask for donations to the Northfield Community Action Center food shelf. Last year the Trick-or-Treat raised 4450 pounds of food for the shelf. Culinary House held a cupcake-decorating event. The chapel’s pumpkin-carving contest did not quite go as planned, as there was only one entrant, but that one entrant was a good one.
A new tradition started off this year with the Watson Penthouse Pumpkin Toss. Watson’s seventh-floor balcony simply cries out for things to be dropped off of it. Pumpkins make a nice gooshy explosion when they are dropped off of tall things. Clearly this was a match made in heaven. The event’s organizers employed proper safety precautions, laying down a tarp on the Watson front steps and roping off the area so nobody would get beaned. After the toss, all those present agreed it was awesome.
The highlight of the evening was, of course, the Halloween Concert. The band played the usual “Night on Bald Mountain,” the Star Wars theme, “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” as well as the St. Olaf fight song, complete with cross-dressing cheerleader. President Oden showed up as Indiana Jones. But what students really came for was the chance to see how creative their classmates got with the annual costume contest. Here are the standings:
For the group costume contest:
First place: Brown vs. Board of Education
Second place: Mario Kart
Third place: The Entire Cast of Arrested Development
And for the individual:
First place: The SWA Stall
Second place: Max from Where the Wild Things Are
Third place: Big Ben
Many, many more costumes in the photo gallery.
