Snowman Burning 2009: Corporate Greed

Members of Lake Superior State University's maintenance department and student volunteers worked this week on the main attraction for the University's time-honored tradition of welcoming spring. At high noon on Friday, March 20, LSSU marked the first day of the spring season by burning a massive paper snowman, as it has done for almost 40 years.

Spring officially arrives in the Northern Hemisphere that day at 7:44 a.m. EDT.

The first spring snowman burning was held in March 1971 by a former campus club called the Unicorn Hunters.

Traditionally, the ceremony has been held on the first day of spring to bid good-bye to winter and welcome to spring.

The ceremony takes its inspiration from the Rose Sunday Festival in Weinheim-en-der-Bergstrasse, Germany. In the festival, a parade passes through town to a central location, where the mayor makes a proposal to the towns children: If the children are good, study, obey their parents and work hard, he will order the (straw) snowman to be burned, and spring will officially arrive. After the children yell their approval and make their promise, the snowman is burned.

Some people contend that smoke from the conflagration wards off blizzards and ushers in spring-like weather. The Unicorn Hunters validated this theory by the second or third year of the event. At that time, after the snowman was burned, a blizzard passed through the eastern Upper Peninsula and northern Lower Peninsula but missed Sault Ste. Marie.

Students and employees of the University's maintenance department construct the snowman mostly from paper destined for the recycling bin, along with a wood and wire frame. The snowmen are husky and stand 10-12 feet. This year's is 14 feet tall.

LSSU's snowmen have taken on many shapes over the years. During the 1970s, when women's liberation was a news issue, a snow person was burned. In the 1980s, when clones and cloning were first in the news, a snow clone was torched. The Unicorn Hunters also burned a Snow Ayatollah Khomeni during the heated days of the Iran hostage crisis.

This years creation is an oversized if somewhat deflated corporate mogul.

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[WatermelonRat]

I watched that today, it was very entertaining. I stood right next to the cameraperson in that first shot. I love this tradition.