Poster Design

To continue the design theme as of late, I'd like to show a poster I did just recently.

I am the treasurer of a student club here on campus, and our biggest event is an annual winter party. The president of the club assigned jobs to help with this event to all officers of the club, and the student who was assigned to do the poster sent around this PowerPoint slide:

Figure 1: PowerPoint should never have invented clip-art words

Some information redacted for the guise of anonymity, of course. And although I appreciate the effort of the student, upon downloading this attachment I volunteered myself to do the graphics. So then in about 45 minutes with Adobe Illustrator I came up with:

Figure 2: The "after" shot

Actually, I realized that if you do a search for "winter" on Google Images, the FIRST image that comes up is the image in the "before" PowerPoint. Now I admit that I didn't draw my background image from scratch either, but goodness, at least mine I had to DIG for a bit...

So perhaps my version is at least an improvement, although I would have liked to spend more time on it. Is there anything in the "after" version you would change, or would you have done something different altogether?