Jesus, and the lighting of a Christmas tree. The evening ends with hundreds of students attending a Mass in the Immaculate Conception Chapel.
Ellie Kurtz, director of the University of Dayton's student union from 1964 to 1994, started Christmas on Campus as a way for students to celebrate Christmas before heading home for the winter break. "One night I was preoccupied with a sense of disappointment that students would be leaving for Christmas vacation and would not be able to celebrate Christmas with their friends and the UD family,"Kurtz said before her death in 2009, "I imagined what a wonderful Christmas we could have if we could celebrate Christmas before the students went home for the holidays".
=== Club and intramural sports ===
In addition to varsity athletics, there are 37 club and 12 intramural sports. In January 2006, the university opened RecPlex, a $25 million sports and recreational facility for students of the university. The Princeton Review has the University of Dayton first on its latest "Everybody …