Featured Testimonial About Creighton University
O Christmas Tree, O Christmas Tree.
How lovely are your ... pages?
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This is the third year in a row that a custom-made Christmas tree has been assembled inside the Ahmanson Law Center’s Klutznick Law Library.
Using law books! Like, the Journal of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers. And, the Journal of Natural Resources & Environmental Law, Volume 18. Plus, of course, a few other more traditional decorative items.
And yes, certainly, its pages are indeed as lovely as evergreen branches!
How many books are used for tree?
Well, it's a Christmas surprise. Kind of.
It traditionally takes a couple of days to assemble the tree (including several breaks to handle other work duties, too). Erin Dunkleman, BS’08, is a resources and systems specialist in the library and she typically takes the lead on this project. She has help, of course.
Combined, Dunkleman said she and student staffers probably filled 10 library carts with books. A special shoutout goes to Emery Laine, the library's metadata and digital initiatives specialist, for making decorative additions and completing the final few layers.
But... how many books?
Someone knows. But they won't tell. Not yet.
Dunkleman and her team like to hold a guessing contest each year for law students. The winning guess gets announced when they disassemble the tree!
(Last year, the final number of books was 579).
If you happen to have any experience sorting and shelving books, you might consider stopping by the law library in January. That's the most laborious part of this holiday project, Dunkleman said.
Here’s how the Law School Christmas book-tree came to be:
Dunkleman remembers seeing a smaller version maybe 10 or 11 years ago inside Reinert-Alumni Memorial Library. And several social media images of creative designs before that.
It was in 2018 that she took her first stab at building one of her own. One year, the tree sat on a table. She skipped a couple of Christmas seasons, then brought it back upon requests from students, faculty and staff.
Two Decembers ago, Dunkleman set her sights on a 6-foot-tall tree. Last year’s version may have been just a tad bigger. This year's, too.
A sidenote for end-of-semester studiers: Dunkleman and her designers always choose books that are also available online.
Below is a look at the evolution of the Law School Christmas tree over the years.
