As the first semester drew to a close, holiday traditions started popping up around DePaul College Prep with events such as Joyeux Noel, finding Tiny Tim in the library and Cocoa and Caroling. This year, one old tradition was revived — a holiday door decorating contest.
For the contest, FRESH classes were divided by grade with three winners for each. There was also a faculty door decorating contest. The prize was a donut party that would take place after the return from winter break.
Britt Parker, the Assistant Director of Student Activities, said that she and Chris Petersen, Director of Student Activities, were the first to pitch the idea to Student Government, hoping to restart the contest from years past. Students “jumped on it. They [student government] said, ‘Yes, we would love to do that. Let’s run with it,” Parker said.
After that initial meeting on November 6th, the students did the rest of the planning, including deciding the rules and parameters.
According to junior student representative Reagan Stecz, they took three weeks to plan it all out then spent one week planning how to judge it. The only guidelines were to make the door holiday spirited and ensure the door still worked. This was to allow for creativity.
“The most important rule we wanted to include was having everyone in each FRESH participate. We wanted to bring the FRESH classes together to bond,” said Stecz.
When it came to decorating, FRESH classes had about two and a half weeks. Most didn’t start until there was less than a week until the deadline, though. Parker said in the end seven freshman, eight sophomore, six junior, and five senior doors were decorated out of 56 total fresh classes that could have participated. Eight doors were also decorated by faculty members.
The winners of the contests were, for freshmen, Claire Kaminski and Bernadette Raspante’s FRESH in first place, Megan McCabe’s in second, and Jonathan Moeller’s in third. For sophomores, Victoria Aguilar and Will Schneider’s was first, Noah Deck’s second, and Dylan Armstrong and Laura Burns’s third. In first place for juniors was Craig Bryant’s, followed by Kaitlyn Pancini and Marcela Ramirez’s, with Alyse Adolf and Richard Raho’s in third. Finally, the winner for the seniors was Colleen Kilgalleon-Wagler’s, second was Adam Galvez and Melissa Flynn’s, and third was Christina Baik’s.
Facilities won the faculty and staff contest with counseling in second and the testing center and athletics tied for third. The teams won because of their creative and festive designs with them all sticking to holiday colors, like green, red or blue. Many of the winning doors had Christmas trees on them or pictures of students or teachers in the FRESH. One door had a snowman with snowflakes while another had an elf. Pancini and Ramirez’s FRESH had each student depicted as a gingerbread man.
Art teacher Victoria Aguilar said that in her FRESH she helped her kids with some of the details but mainly they did most of the work. They took the Grinch the Kid meme, which depicts the grinch as blue and upset about having knee surgery the following day, and then added presents, a list of all their names and other holiday symbols. They used construction paper, ribbon, chalk pastels, printer paper and tape. Aguilar said, “I wanted them to win really badly…I’m very competitive” but at the end of the day, she did it for the students in her FRESH. In her room, one group first started planning it and executing it, but more people joined in later on. She said it was beautiful to see it come together. They did the work during one period and then the rest outside of class, including at least once before school Wednesday.
Kaminski and Raspante’s FRESH created a door with ornaments, a Christmas tree, and presents. They took two or three FRESH periods to complete it and “literally buzzer beated the star at the last fresh class,” as students JP Hortatsos and Dom Montalvo said. For their process they “made the Christmas tree…hung up the red behind it to make it pop…[and] taped ornaments. We made the presents. We made the star…The finished product really just looked good.” They already have plans for competing again next year sharing how “we know we put [in] so much hard work.”
After the time to decorate was over, it was time for student representatives and faculty members to judge them. Parker said that the rubric included categories for work, creativity, effort, inclusivity of holidays and overall holiday spirit, recurring theme and visual appeal. When it came to judging “we divided and conquered because there were so many to judge, and we only had one fresh period to judge them.” Representatives judged in groups of two to three with an adult, such as DePaul Prep Principal Megan Stanton Anderson or Galvez judging. Stecz said that they made sure there was no conflict of interest in the judging.
Overall it was successful, as Stecz shared “A handful of the doors were decorated awesomely and it was fun to see them as I walked down the halls. It also provided more holiday decorations to the school, and overall made the holiday spirit higher!”
Parker expressed a willingness to do the contest again next year, as she said “we’re very excited to hopefully make this an annual tradition, especially now that we got a lot of interest last year…We’re hoping we can regenerate that same interest next year, especially with the prizes at stake as well.”
