December 6, 2010

Lights spark season of celebration

Gingerbread competition, a cappella performances bring crowd for sixth annual Lighting of the Quads

After listening to performances by a cappella groups, students sipped hot chocolate on a brisk, windy (and slightly damp) Wednesday evening and watched as President Ron Daniels, Provost Lloyd Minor and Sarah Steinberg, interim vice provost for student affairs, flipped a ceremonial switch with the JHU Pep Band playing in the background. In that moment, the Keyser Quadrangle lit up, kicking off a season of celebration on the Homewood campus.

The sixth annual Lighting of the Quads has become a Johns Hopkins tradition that has brought hundreds of students, faculty and staff to the foot of the Eisenhower Library to begin the month of December.

New to the festivities this year was a gingerbread house contest, whose entries included Gilman Hall with candy-cane pillars and a frosted clock tower (one of several Gilmans entered) and Shriver Hall with a bricklike facade and two statues in place. The winner was a block of row houses carefully constructed, appropriately enough, by a team from the History Department. Second place went to Alumni Affairs’ aforementioned Gilman Hall, and third place to a fanciful confectionery rendition of Hogwarts, Harry Potter’s alma mater, built by a student team called Dumbledore’s Army.

The event was sponsored by the Office of the Dean of Student Life and the Student Government Association.

Photos by Will Kirk/Homewoodphoto.jhu.edu