Campus has been buzzing this week with big little season. Freshman girls can be spotted at all hours of the day hauling overstuffed Big Little baskets across campus, shedding a trail of loose stickers, bits of confetti, and stray baked goods behind them. The baskets are towering, the piles of snacks bigger, and every sorority Instagram story looks like a Party City, Walmart, and Trader Joe’s collaboration.
If you aren’t familiar, every spring, sororities host Big Little reveal week where in the days leading up to the big reveal, Bigs (veteran members of sororities) give their Littles (newly initiated members) oversized baskets stuffed with snacks, sorority merch, and themed gifts usually all tied to a color or aesthetic. These baskets are basically care packages on steroids: candy, chips, drinks, blankets, posters, accessories, sweatshirts, and anything else you can slap Greek letters onto. They are given to kick off the Big/Little relationship with an over-the-top display of affection.
And it’s adorable. But let’s be real. Once the photos are storied with the caption “I love my big” or “luckiest little,” what’s left? A dorm room overtaken by 12 cubic feet of snacks you didn’t ask for you and definitely don’t have space for. Big little season is a labor of love, but also, occasionally, a live study in excess.
The most iconic snack choices & basket themes I’ve seen this year
Basket themes, the specific concept a Big chooses to build her Little’s basket around so that it feels cohesive, have been elite and each year the creativity reaches new heights.
Here are some of the standouts walking across campus this week:
Six party-sized bags of pickle chips to fit a green-themed basket because nothing says family like dill flavored dust. A mega-sized tub of Lemonhead ropes for a lemonade stand basket. Ten jars of Nutella stacked on top of six boxes of Cocoa Puffs to match a brown “beary excited to be your big” aesthetic. Four huge packs of golden oreos because apparently there are not enough yellow snacks out there. A Y2K Coachella themed basket adorned with hand-picked flowers and every pastel color imaginable. Twelve cans of Campbell soup for my own GG little because of course every nineteen year old girl needs a personalized tomato soup reserve.
It’s sweet, it’s funny, and it’s a love language in snack form. But at some point when you are checking out at Walmart with a cart full of color-coded cereal and enough candy to stock a concession stand, it’s understandable to wonder if we’ve gone a little overboard.
A lot of us don’t make it through even a fraction of the snacks. By midterms, usually half is untouched and inevitably most ends up under the bed or forgotten. If you find yourself with bags of snacks and no realistic way to finish them, there are still plenty of ways to put them to good use.
Some creative ways to repurpose the snack overflow
Snacks can be repurposed, shared, or redistributed.
You can make a dorm snack bar. I left many of my snacks next to the vending machine in the common room of my freshman dorm. Every morning after a night out, the stash would be wiped clean. I never knew who ate them, but I can guarantee they were psyched when they saved the $3 on the vending machine and got something better and bigger instead. It’s communal and does chaotic good. It clears valuable space and makes you the unsung hero of the floor. Win-win.
Donate what you can’t eat. Unexpired, unopened snacks are so helpful to local food banks. In New Orleans, both Second Harvest Food Bank and New Orleans Mission accept shelf-stable items and make drop-offs easy. And if you are not in New Orleans, a quick Google search can lead you to drop off spots near your campus.