Photo courtesy Of Hamilton college/Nancy L. Ford
On Tuesday, Feb. 12, Hamilton College kicked off its annual FebFest tradition, a week-long celebration featuring various events centered around food, sports, and entertainment. From beer tastings to snowshoeing to comedy shows, this festival, which dates back to 1925, has become a winter-season hallmark of the Hamilton experience.
Assistant Director of Student Activities Kaity Stewart, one of the main organizers of FebFest, sees the week as a reinvigorated Hamilton tradition.
“The winter carnival was held for several decades, then waned in the 1990s and was reborn as FebFest in 2000,” she said. “In the past decade, the Student Assembly’s Social Traditions Committee has been integral in planning FebFest with us in Student Activities.”
With the funding and support from Student Assembly, FebFest has become a week of the spring semester filled with all-campus events, with some originating as far back as the early 20th century and others being introduced each year.
“In the past, for the Winter Carnival,” said Stewart, “there were dance parties, a ‘queen of the carnival contest,’ and a variety of outdoor snow-based events like snoccer (snow soccer) and snow sculpture contests.”
Though erratic snowfall and weather leading up to FebFest 2019 made it difficult to organize snow-related events as in recent years, Stewart says there are some events that, due to their popularity, remained central features of the week’s programming. She explains that traditionally, there has always been “a beer tasting, chocolate tasting, and cheese tasting, which are always popular, as well as a CAB acoustic show and a CAB comedy show. We also always work with HOC for some snowshoeing as well.
“This year the 26th annual Chili Cook-off was also part of FebFest! It was very popular, and most chili was gone within the first hour of the event.”
This year also introduced changes based on student feedback and ideas.
“In recent years, for FebFest, we had traditionally held a pageant called Mr. Hamilton,” said Stewart. “However, this pageant was sometimes seen as problematic for being heteronormative, so we decided to skip that event this year in favor of trying some new things.”
These new events included a trip to the Turning Stone Resort and Casino for dinner, as well as a food truck rodeo, where students sampled free offerings from four free food trucksoutside the Sadove Student Center.
The new additions to FebFest this year, as well as the winter carnival in general, seemed to garner favorable response from students.
Kyra Richardson ’21 said, “I really liked the food truck this year! FebFest is one of my favorite Hamilton traditions, primarily because it serves as a great relief from the cold and often busy days of this point in the semester.”
Claire Kitz ’19 agreed, saying, “I think generally February is one of the toughest months of wintertime — with the workload ever slowly increasing and Seasonal-Affective Disorder making the days seem a little more tiring — FebFest is Hamilton’s positive solution to the woes of February. I am so grateful, especially as a senior, that Hamilton provides events geared towards building community.”
Moving forward, the Student Activities Office, in coordination with Student Assembly, hopes to continue making positive adjustments to FebFest.
Says Stewart: “This year we tried to make FebFest more manageable and exciting by holding higher quality, but less quantity, of events. We shorted the calendar of events from 7 days to 5 days. I think this was beneficial because 7 full days of non-stop programming can lead to burnout. We would love to continue to partner with student organizations and other departments in the Division of Student Life to offer a wide variety of programming for FebFest!”
Students, for their part, appear to view the week as one of the highlights of the spring semester.
“My mood improves noticeably during this jam-packed week of programming,” said Richardson.
