The Green Review

UNB has taken a different approach to this year’s holiday video:

After another challenging year, it's time to celebrate the end of the semester with some winter fun. UNB students want to kick off the holiday season how they imagined it, with skating, sledding, and snowman-building before they head home for their break. But alas, there is no snow! This UNB family comes together to create their own winter wonderland for all to enjoy.

This fun, comedic, and heartwarming video offers some light and good cheer for the UNB community, while also highlighting the resilience and adaptability of our students.

There’s snow place like UNB.

You can view the video on UNB’s YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Linkedin accounts.

With the 2021 holiday video, we wanted to ensure we were closely aligned to UNB’s values. While the video is certainly a nod to our people-centric, values-informed university community, we also wanted to ensure that we touched on the modern, integrated and sustainable pillar of UNB’S Strategic Vision.

Because this year’s video involved creating an indoor winter wonderland, we decided to engage UNB Sustainability early on to help make this a Green Event. Here are some of the actions we took in order to do so:

1. Many of the decorations and props used in the holiday video were borrowed from other faculties, units and staff members to avoid buying new. These units include the Saint John mailroom, Marketing, Alumni, Recruitment, Conference Services, UNB Reds, Seawolves and Media Services. Anything that was bought new (such as the coffee mugs) will be repurposed for our Strategic Communications & Marketing Office.
2. We rented lights and white drapes to help decorate the scene, and used LED lights to decorate the trees.
3. We used natural pinecones to help decorate the trees and for our candle arrangements (they have since been returned to the forest). We also used real birch logs for the artificial bonfire.
4. All the paper snowflakes used for the scene were made from 100% recycled paper. You may even notice a math equation or two on the back, as many scrap pages were collected from the HIL recycle bins. These snowflakes will remain in the lounge for the holiday season, and many of their scraps have since been composted.
5. The winter wonderland scene was shot in the first-floor lounge of our newly constructed and energy-efficient Barry and Flora Beckett Residence on the Saint John campus.

We were really happy to have guidance from the UNB Sustainability team in planning for the holiday video. Not only did they have some great insights for making an eco-friendlier winter wonderland, they were also able to find us some volunteers to help with the decorations.

Happy holidays, everyone! May your days be merry and bright, and may all your UNB events be … green!