Valley Family Fun: Share Thanksgiving
By Laura Churchill Duke
This year, why don’t you consider sharing Thanksgiving with a newcomer family?
Our family has participated in this program for the past four years and can’t wait to do it again this year! Engage Nova Scotia has put together this wonderful program where your family is paired with a newcomer who joins you for your Thanksgiving dinner. Simply go to the website and indicate when you are having your meal (Sunday or Monday) and then who else will be at your table. Then, the organization will match you and connect you with the newcomers!
In particular, they are looking for lots of hosts around Acadia and Kingstec, where there are a lot of international students wanting to connect. Most members of our family have lived overseas so we know what it means to be included. It’s a great way to experience another culture, have interesting conversations, learn something new, and make new friends.
If you are a newcomer, there is also a place on the website you can go to sign up to be a guest at Thanksgiving. In our first year, we had Thanksgiving with two Acadia students from Germany, and the next year a family from Albania joined us, along with an entire TV crew! So, if you go to the Share Thanksgiving website, you can see our video. They wanted to film a family with chaos, and they got it! We’ve had students from Pakistan and China, too. Every year it’s a new learning experience and a surprise at who we will be matched with.
You can sign up to be a host or guest here:
sharethanksgiving-engagenovascotia.nationbuilder.com/
This is a wonderful experience for your family that I cannot recommend enough! We hope this year you will Share Thanksgiving, too!