Students Share Holiday Fun With Staff, Faculty and Alumnae Via Thanksgiving Match Program

Building snow figures, playing Monopoly by the fire and sampling grandmother’s cornbread stuffing were among the holiday traditions Smithies and college host families shared over last week’s Thanksgiving recess.

A dozen hosts and 26 students participated in the college’s fifth annual Thanksgiving Match program that brings students, faculty and staff together for a meal and some holiday fun.

Among this year’s hosts were Donna Lisker, dean of the college; Jessica Nicoll, director and chief curator for the Smith College Museum of Art; Karen Klinger, head rowing coach; and David Bishop, HVAC systems operator for facilities management.

About 300 Smithies remained on campus over the Thanksgiving recess—many of them international students eager to experience local holiday customs.

The match formalizes a college tradition of staff and faculty opening their homes to students. Jan Morris, administrative assistant in student affairs, says she decided to launch the program five years ago to create more opportunities for students to connect with members of the campus community.

“I love the matching part,” said Morris, who has worked at Smith for 18 years. “I also love hearing from people afterwards about what they did together over the holiday.”

In October, Morris sends out a call to students, faculty and staff interested in making a holiday match. This year for the first time the call also went out to alumnae, and Morris said five alumnae families signed on to host students.

To guide her in making the matches, Morris uses a brief survey about dietary restrictions, preferred family environments and why students and hosts were drawn to the program. Host families agree to provide a meal on Thanksgiving Day and transportation for their guests.

“The program is really cool,” said Bishop, whose family has hosted students for each of the past five Thanksgivings. “It’s an education for us and for the students.”

This year, Cynthia Masai and Zuliat Owoade, both juniors, joined Bishop’s family for a meal and a walk around the Tighe-Carmody Reservoir near the family’s home in Southampton.

“The students also played in the snow, which for Zuliat, was the first time,” Bishop said. “They also both went up for seconds of the holiday meal, and that means a lot to us.”

Masai said Bishop’s family was “welcoming, lovely and funny—people you want to be with every minute.”

“The food was amazing,” added Masai, who is from Kenya. “For once I forgot that I was away from home.”

Klinger ’87 said she frequently hosts Smith athletes for the holidays, but this is the first year she decided to participate in the match program. Shreya Sengupta ’18, Chunying Huangdai ’17 and Kyung Hyun Mhin ’16 signed up to join Klinger’s family and one of her rowers, Liz Sukhinenko ’15, for Thanksgiving festivities.

What did that entail?

“The students came over in time to taste things, help mash potatoes, finish setting up and eat—a lot!” Klinger said.

“After enjoying our traditional Thanksgiving food, including my grandmother’s cornbread stuffing, they all played a rousing and cutthroat game of Monopoly with my 11-year-old son, John,” she added. “He managed to trounce the Smithies!”

Jingyi Gan ’17 said she was eager to be part of the holiday match program because “I generally like to talk to people and I wanted to experience Thanksgiving in a traditional way.”

Gan, who hails from China, said she was also looking for a chance to “get in touch with people outside of school.”

Gan and fellow sophomore Junzhou Liu were matched with Patsy Kauffman Barber, an educational consultant who attended Smith for a semester in 1992. Alumnae Raquel Manzanares ’08 and Maureen Mollahan AC ’10, a philanthropic officer in the development office, were also guests at Kauffman Barber’s table.

Kauffman Barber’s daughters, Sophie, 8, and Casey, 10, attend the Pioneer Valley Chinese Immersion Charter School in Hadley and were thrilled to be able to spend time with the two students at Thanksgiving.

Her daughters were “a little shy about speaking,” Kauffman Barber said. “But they had a fun time just hearing about China and sharing places they knew on the map.”

The college’s Thanksgiving Match program got a shoutout in a recent story on saycampuslife.com about how to spend the holiday at college.

For information about next year’s match program at Smith, contact Morris at 585-4933.