Initially, my office had a hand-drawn image of a companion of Saint Nicholas: Knecht Ruprecht. However, we were repeatedly told that it would not win:

My officemate and I had a secret surprise in store for our door. Before and during the Thanksgiving break, my officemate (Md. Abedul Haque) and I began work on converting a Christmas tree skirt (last used as a beard at the Halloween party) into two stockings to hang on a fireplace we would build after the break. Abed also built a small replica of the monument associated with International Mother Language Day, which commemorates the sacrifices the Bengali made for their language (Abed is from Bangaladesh).

The Monday after the Thanksgiving break, Abed and I spent a few hours building the fireplace out of cereal boxes, construction paper, paper towels, a box, and lots of tape. The next day, we wrote letters from Santa to be placed in our stockings that were responses to the letters we had written to Santa. Abed's letter said that he had passed all four prelims while in mine, Santa said he didn't want to be my advisor. I also printed out four PhD Carols I had written.

The day of the judging, our door was mostly complete, but we didn't have anything for the top half of our door. The drawing of Knecht Ruprecht had come down and the top half of our door was looking empty. In a last-minute decision, I printed out five pictures of people and events from the CS department, placed colorful borders around them, and taped them to our door. Below is a picture of our final door.

If you look on the whiteboard towards the top, you will see the words "will lose" pointing to an image of Knecht Ruprecht (hidden by the door). This was written by Ryan Moore, the one who came up with the competition. I mention this because he wanted to be mentioned on this page.