Ranked the sixth best winter carnival in the world by National Geographic in 2012, the College’s annual celebration has held the media’s fascination for decades, and has been featured in publications ranging from Playboy magazine to the Boston Globe.
The Carnival is known as the first collegiate winter carnival in existence, Collis Center for Student Involvement director Eric Ramsey said. The event garners large amounts of publicity for the College and attracts many different types of visitors over the course of the weekend.
Numerous publications have written in-depth articles on Winter Carnival over its history. Sports Illustrated ran an extensive story in 1955 by Budd Schulberg ’36, who visited for the weekend with F. Scott Fitzgerald when they attempted to make a movie adaptation of their book “Winter Carnival.”
In 1960, CBS filmed the Carnival festivities, and 11 years later Playboy used the weekend’s events as a backdrop for the magazine’s “Playmate of the Month” feature. The big weekend has also been used as a setting for advertisements for Pepsi and Studebaker cars, among other products.
Over time, the weekend has not lost its charm and still receives a great deal of media attention. The Examiner ran stories about the weekend in 2009, 2010 and 2012, while Yankee Magazine covered the 2011 event. This past month The Boston Globe previewed the weekend, calling it “reason alone to pay Hanover, N.H., a visit.”
Despite this external fascination, the College focuses most of its advertising efforts on the student body, Ramsey said.
“The event is planned by undergrads, so we focus on undergrads,” he said. “However, the event is community-wide so it includes alums, grad students and residents of Hanover. Different people at Dartmouth reach out to different constituents and outreach deals with media requests.”
Students receive printed schedules, information emailed to campus by the Winter Carnival Committee and word of mouth guidelines from upperclassmen about which events to attend.
The event’s history has piqued the interest of a number of media sources.
“It has history as a significant weekend at Dartmouth and New England so there is natural name recognition,” Ramsey said. “It is one of the celebrations that embraces the outdoors in the winter, and it certainly used to be one of the biggest.”
While the history and media attention brings many extra visitors to Hanover for the weekend, not all see this as a positive occurrence. Ellie Loughlin ’89 recounts overcrowded parties and said the weekend is less focused on the Dartmouth community.
“The campus used to get inundated with visitors, and that could be overwhelming,” Loughlin said. “My favorite weekends were Green Key because there were so many outdoor events and Homecoming because I love the bonfire. Those had fewer visitors so it was more about Dartmouth people.”
Today’s students agree. Many students say they enjoy the other big weekends more than Winter Carnival.
“In my experience, Winter Carnival has never really struck me as that different than any other weekend of the winter term,” Julia Isaacson ’15 said. “There are always lots of community events but none that are well-attended by students. Green Key, on the other hand, is an absolute blast.”
Meg Parson ’16 disagrees, saying that Winter Carnival is her second favorite big weekend of the year.
“It has more scheduled events during the daytime than any other big weekend,” she said. “While it may not be as popular as it was historically, I still think it’s a fun weekend for students.”
