WinterBowl Spead Through East Lansing, New Name

Jeffrey Proulx

Despite a new name and minor changes to festival structure, the 2007 Winter Bowl spread through downtown East Lansing this past Sunday.  With booths and tents featuring reindeer petting to hot cocoa, festival guests were greeted by friendly volunteers and a range of events supported by diverse funding.    

To yearly Winter Bowl participants, the 2007 festival may have looked slightly different from that of previous years.  Two primary changes were made to the annual winter celebration.  The first alteration was an outdoor stage and tent to house the annual chili cook-off, and the second was the addition of an Arts and Crafts show sponsored by the Michigan State University Activities Board. These changes were due primarily to prior Winter Bowl success, but with an even bigger festival than last year, where did the extra funding come from?

“It’s built into the entertainment budget every year.”  answered Matt Mergener, the co-coordinator of this year’s Winter Bowl .  He continued on to explain that part of this year’s expansion was due to a diversity of funding and a new partnership. 

As put by Mergener, this year the city of East Lansing budgeted in $13,000 to fund the Winter Bowl.  This figure is not the only one important to the success of the festival in 2007.  To help the festival grow, a partnership with the Michigan State University Activities Board provided an additional $3,000.  The East Lansing Arts Commission and downtown business groups also contributed with a net total of $2,700.   

“The goal is to get more people into downtown East Lansing.”  said Michelle Carlson when asked for the reason behind the expansion.  Carlson was a co-coordinator of the Winter Bowl and added insight into the reasons behind some of the festival’s changes.

In years past, the chili cook-off was held in the Marriott Hotel on the corner of M.A.C. Ave. and Albert Ave., but due to lines of people that snaked through the hotel lobby and an amount of hungry guests that consumed all of the chili within an hour, the event needed more room to grow.      

Despite this change, Meghan Schwarb, the East Lansing centennial coordinator, added that the estimated number of volunteers was 20 people and that the expected amount of guests was 1,000.  Based on the smiles of kids petting reindeer and the laughter of people huddling under their umbrellas in Sunday’s rain, the numbers of volunteers and festival guests didn’t matter.  What seemed to matter more was the diversity of activities available and the fun holiday atmosphere of downtown East Lansing.