Below are some tips, ideas, and time-honored traditions from members of the Fordham community to help make the holiday fun, restorative, and as stress-free as possible.

Gratitude for Family—‘the Greatest Blessing’

Thanksgiving brings with it the chance to reflect on our blessings, and chief among them is family, said Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham.

“I find myself singing ‘We Gather Together’ often in the course of the day,” said Father McShane, referring to the traditional Thanksgiving hymn. “Moreover, as the ordained member of my family, I lead grace at our Thanksgiving dinner. Prior to offering the prayer, I ask my family to spend a few moments in silent prayer reviewing all of the graces and blessings that they have experienced in the course of the year (and in the course of their lives), with special emphasis on the people God has brought into our lives. We dwell in that moment and savor the rich memories we all have of those who used to be with us around the Thanksgiving table. Then we pray in a formal way and toast our parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, brothers, and sisters—the greatest blessing that God sent us.”

Friendsgiving Dinners

For those who find themselves without plans for a big Thanksgiving dinner, or for those who’d like to squeeze in an extra one and meet some new people in the process, Fordham student entrepreneurs have got you covered.

Gabelli School students Joseph Zoyhofski, Liam Scott, Alex TenBarge, and Emily Lehman founded a meal-sharing platform called the Provecho Project, after the Spanish phrase buen provecho which roughly translates to “enjoy your meal.”

The site works by allowing users to advertise a meal they’d like to make at home, and how much they plan to charge for it. Those interested can sign on, and the site charges a small processing fee on top of the price of the meal.

Last year, the group staged its first “Friendsgiving,” in which a provecho, or meal, was held every day for the week leading up to Thanksgiving. With a new website up and running, Zoyhofski said they’re excited to stage Friendsgiving again this year, from Nov. 21 to 27.

The meals have primarily attracted students, although they are open to all members of the Fordham community. To join a meal, visit their website.

A Holiday Classic: Julia Child’s Chocolate Mousse

When it comes to Thanksgiving dessert, most people expect a table full of pies. But one Fordham employee whips up something different each year: homemade chocolate mousse.

“My husband’s a real chocoholic, so I always have to have something chocolate for him for dessert,” said Patricia Wolff, a Fordham financial aid counselor. “I started making it 30 years ago, and it’s delicious.”

The recipe—originally created by acclaimed chef Julia Child—calls for a quarter cup of dark-brewed coffee. Wolff said she adds two shots of hot espresso, used to melt the chocolate.

Besides being delicious, the dessert is convenient.

“You make it the day before, so it just sits in the fridge,” Wolff said. “There’s always too much going on in the oven, so that’s another good reason to have this for Thanksgiving.”

Finding the Right Wine

For those looking for the perfect Thanksgiving wine, Gabriella Macari, GABELLI ’09, of Macari Vineyards in Mattituck on Long Island, reminds everyone that, “the first rule of wine pairings is that there are no rules.”

Still, she had a few pieces of advice for those looking for the perfect bottle.

“Traditional Thanksgiving pairings include wines that pair with turkey such as light-bodied reds; Pinot Noir, Cabernet Franc, and Gamay are great choices,” said Macari, a certified sommelier.

While many people continue to serve red with dessert, Macari recommends switching to a sparkling wine. Finding a wine with meaning can also make it taste that much sweeter.

“Holiday wines should be delicious and can be even better if they mean something to you,” Macari said. “For us, for example, opening an old vintage of one of our wines to share with friends and family is very meaningful and evokes strong emotion.”

Macari also encouraged people to shop local wines for the American holiday.

“American wines are now better than ever,” she said.

Prioritizing Wellness

When everyone’s done with dinner, dessert, and libations, the living room couch beckons. But some families are looking for more ways to stay active and burn a few of those extra calories.

“Consider a Turkey Trot on Thanksgiving morning,” Jeanne Molloy, wellness manager at Fordham, said. “These 5Ks have grown in popularity and can be walked in 45 to 60 minutes if you haven’t trained to run it. That morning outing will help boost your metabolism all day.”

A post-walk dinner with the dogs can also be a way to stretch the legs and make your pets happy, Molloy said.

Sarah Bickford, the administrator of fitness and recreation at the Ram Fit Center, said physical activity can have the added benefit of helping to ward off any holiday blues.

“The holidays can also be a stressful time for people,” she said. “Exercise or group activities can be a great way to help people relax, come together, and feel better.”

Handling Stress

For some, stress will be inevitable. Jeffrey Ng, Psy.D., director of counseling and psychological services (CPS) at Fordham, offered advice on coping with challenging situations.

One of the more common concerns reported by students is balancing family time, self-care, and schoolwork over the holidays—especially right before final exams and project deadlines, said Ng. He advised students to proactively plan their time and identify their needs before break arrives, and to try to be transparent with family and friends about what’s on their plate.

Another common issue is interacting with family members or friends who have differing social or political beliefs, said Ng.

“The college years are a time of heightened identity formation and change, and a student’s emerging beliefs and perspectives may be diverging from their family of origin’s values and perspectives,” said Ng. “While it can be meaningful and growthful to figure out how to navigate potential tensions with family members, it’s also okay to opt out of some interactions or conversations that may feel particularly activating or overwhelming.”

For those who might be alone on Thanksgiving, try to find local opportunities to engage in community service and connect with friends, Ng said. And, he added, be careful with social media usage—too much scrolling may exacerbate feelings of social comparison, FOMO, and loneliness.

“The mind gravitates toward negative experiences and events so we need to intentionally practice gratitude,” Ng said. “The more we practice gratitude outside the context of holidays like Thanksgiving, the more we’ll be able to do so under more challenging circumstances.”

Books that Conjure Gratitude

With plenty of holiday time off and the cold winter months looming, Thanksgiving represents a good time to start plotting wintertime reading. Fred Nachbaur, director of Fordham University Press, said he’s grateful for a couple of recent reads.

Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe (Knopf Doubleday, 2019) is a reminder of darker times in Northern Ireland.

To be honest, I didn’t really know much about the IRA and their covert operations or those of the British government,” said Nachbaur.

The book begins with the abduction of a widowed mother of 10 living in public housing and goes on to give a detailed history of the “Troubles” and the cast of characters involved.

“It reads like a crime story—totally compelling and mind-blowing; I learned a lot,” he said. “We often forget about the more tumultuous times that make you appreciate the relative peace we enjoy here.”

Closer to home, Nachbaur said he is very grateful for Susan Greenfield’s oral history, Sacred Shelter: Thirteen Journeys of Homelessness and Healing (Fordham University Press, 2019). He noted that all of the contributors helped put life into perspective.

Nachbaur feels thankful for one essay in particular, titled “Reflection: Hope,” written by a social worker who worked with a group of formerly incarcerated individuals.

“The author opens up about her difficulty with being adopted and experiencing a deep sense of loss and not fitting in,” he said. She found healing in working through the anger that group members shared stemming from adoption and feeling abandoned by their parents.

“My daughter is adopted and this piece really helped me better understand her challenges,” said Nachbaur. “I am very grateful to the author,” he said.

Giving Beyond the Season of Giving

Every year around the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays there’s an uptick in volunteering. But how can these seasonal volunteers carry the do-good spirit to the rest of the year?

Arto Woodley, Ed.D., executive director for the Center for Community Engaged Learning, said one way to connect with others is to connect with yourself first.

“First ask yourself, what is your passion in reference to engaging in communities, and why is it important to you?” said Woodley. Also, volunteers should consider whether they are looking for a one-time event or sustained involvement, he said.

And rather than reach out to organizations and ask when they need volunteers, Woodley suggests an “asset-based approach” that will help volunteers align their strengths with an organization’s strengths year-round. He suggests that “needs-based” volunteering will inevitably lead to “volunteer fatigue,” because there will always be a new need.

“This requires a paradigm shift from volunteering to engagement and building deeper relationships with organizations and community partners,” he said. “I definitely prefer the model where the organization and the volunteer build something constructive together.”

— Reporting by Taylor Ha, Kelly Kultys, Tom Stoelker, and Patrick Verel

Cindy, a victim of domestic violence, escaped her abuser with her three children and $50 to her name. She used it to pay the cab fare to a safe house.

After being beaten by his stepfather and losing his mother to suicide, James saw his crack addiction spiral wildly out of control, sending him out on the streets.

Challenged with a learning disability and mental illness, Lisa tried to piece together a life for herself and got her own apartment. After a couple of weeks, she came home and found her belongings on the curb. Her landlord kicked her out after discovering her medication for bipolar disorder because he didn’t want “crazy people” living in his house.

These are among 13 stories of homelessness in the new book Sacred Shelter: Thirteen Journeys of Homelessness and Healing, published by Fordham University Press and edited by Fordham University English Professor Susan Celia Greenfield, who conducted hours of interviews with each contributor to help distill their stories.

Describing their life experiences in raw and vivid detail, each storyteller talks about their journey to homelessness and how they healed with the help of faith and community found in a life skills empowerment program for homeless and formerly homeless people. Many of the memoirists graduated from Education Outreach Program (EOP), founded in 1989 by New York Catholic Charities and the Interfaith Assembly on Homelessness and Housing (IAHH). Today, there are several similar programs in the New York area.

“Telling my story is freeing,” said EOP alumnus Dennis Barton to an audience of nearly 250— including 12 of the 13 contributors—at the book launch at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus on December 3.

“I’ve touched base with all of my secrets,” Barton said. “Now this book is out there and can help the sick and suffering.” The Bronx native talked about years of using and selling drugs, being incarcerated, and getting severely beaten by a group of teenagers while asleep on a park bench.

But Barton, who had taken college classes while incarcerated, sought help; in 2002, he graduated from the EOP, something he views as a real accomplishment. “Until that moment, I had never finished anything in my life,” he said.

Barton has since reunited with his family and became an ordained deacon at Middle Collegiate Church. He is a member of the Interfaith Assembly on Homelessness and Housing Speakers Bureau and has been a peer facilitator at the Panim el Panim life skills empowerment program. (Panim el Panim is Hebrew for “face to face.”) He now works as a workshop facilitator at Planned Parenthood of New York City.

“I give back because you can’t keep it if you don’t give it away,” he said, referring to the love and support he received throughout his journey that he now wishes to pass along to others who are struggling.

Sacred Shelter memoirist Michelle Riddle, who graduated from the EOP one year after Barton, told the standing-room-only crowd that she recently celebrated 20 years in recovery. She also volunteers as a life skills empowerment program mentor to give back what was “freely given” to her. “I was strung out and embarrassed, and slowly committing suicide,” she said about her drug addiction. “God rescued me from myself.”

All of the stories chronicled in Sacred Shelter are about serious traumas and crises—mental illness, addiction, and domestic violence. A few storytellers spoke of child abuse and molestation—one was chained to a pole in a filthy basement, another was sexually assaulted by her mother’s boyfriend, and another was routinely beaten by his alcoholic stepfather.

“The most shocking thing to me was the consistency of the trauma,” says editor Greenfield about the interviews she conducted for the book. “It was story after story of gender violence, abuse … and the preponderance of that kind of suffering.”

Another common thread Greenfield sees among the stories is the love and generosity the storytellers showed others even in their darkest moments. She pointed to Riddle, who once gave all of her money to a mother she met on the street with a hungry child, and Barton, who often helped the elderly in his neighborhood carry groceries and clean up.

“It’s so beautiful that even in the thick of it, they were thinking of other people,” said Greenfield, adding that their compassion for others continues in their volunteer work today. “They took the suffering and turned it into an engine of love.”

Also sharing his experience with homelessness at the book launch was James Addison. Despite the horrors of living on the streets and in the Fort Washington Shelter—nicknamed the “House of Pain” among New York City’s homeless—Addison was the recipient of many acts of kindness.

“I was on 34th Street one morning standing in front of a donut shop,” he recalled. “I was so hungry, I hadn’t eaten for days. An employee from the shop came out and handed me a bag of donuts. Those were the best damn donuts I ever ate in my life.”

Barton was also the recipient of kind acts. “People in the neighborhood helped me, gave me food and clothing,” he said. And it wasn’t only strangers; when he reached out to his daughter while in treatment after being estranged for years, she drove from South Carolina with her children to pick him up so they could spend Christmas together—another moment when Barton says that “God showed up for him.”

In their opening remarks, Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham; Rabbi Jeremy Kalmanofsky; and Monsignor Kevin Sullivan, the executive director of Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of New York, talked about the importance of helping others.

They also pointed to the power of the life skills programs for the homeless that run in different churches, temples, and organizations throughout the city, and of the 13 people who shared their stories for Sacred Shelter, who are living examples that change is possible.

“To the 13 very brave men and women who chose to tell their stories: … We are in your debt for reminding us about the dignity of human beings,” said Father McShane.

Added Monsignor Sullivan: “Homelessness is not hopelessness.”

–Claire Curry

Hear Professor Greenfield with memoirists James Addison and Dennis Barton on the Brian Lehrer Show and on Fordham Conversations on WFUV, parts 1 and 2. 

Greenfield recently discussed the author on WBUR, a Boston public radio station and NPR affiliate, on the bicentennial of Austen’s death at age 41.

In the interview, which aired on July 18, Greenfield revealed what drew her to study Austen.

“As I grew older, I really appreciated her humor and insight. As a scholar, I find myself fascinated by so many things—by her literary technique, her narrative perspective, by her use of irony, and, particularly, her satire of human greed and cruelty and her critique of the abusive power, what we might call the patriarchal power, . . . class power, colonial power … she’s more relevant than ever at this moment in history.”

As WBUR had just aired a segment on the current health care debate prior to her interview about Jane Austen, Greenfield said it was easy to see why the novelist’s work has such contemporary relevance.

“Jane Austen is extremely interested in the difference between people who care about other people’s lives, and those who don’t,” she said.

Listen to the entire interview, which runs about 20 minutes and also includes insight from Whit Stillman, director of Love and Friendship, an adaptation of the Jane Austen novel Lady Susan, here.

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The Needy and the Needed: Grappling with Tough Questions about Homelessness and Service

Happy 200th Birthday, Pride and Prejudice.

When she had signed up for Susan Greenfield’s course on homelessness this semester—an English course with 30 required hours of service learning—she was as ready and willing as any Jesuit-educated student to serve the community.

But when she showed up to volunteer at a Bronx shelter for women and children and was told that there was no need for her, Shilo was at a loss.

“When we fulfill a need, we feel important, we feel irreplaceable, and we feel satisfied,” Shilo, a junior at Fordham College at Rose Hill, said during Greenfield’s Friday morning class. “When . . . this need-based satisfaction was taken out of the [equation], I began to question what my motive was in doing service.

“Am I serving simply to feel good about myself, and is it okay if I am, as long as the result is the same? Am I doing it as a type of ‘humble brag,’ making sure everyone knows that I am a socially conscious, ‘good,’ and caring individual?”

Feeling conflicted about service

These are the tough questions that Greenfield, PhD, a professor of English, wants her undergraduate students to be bothered by. Her course, Homelessness: Literary Representation and Historical Reality, uses a literary approach to examine the complex issues surrounding homelessness. On the reading list are texts ranging from classics such as The Grapes of Wrath to contemporary memoirs such as Lee Stringer’s Grand Central Winter: Stories from the Street.

On the experiential side, students have heard stories firsthand from formerly homeless individuals who spoke to the class. In addition, the students are required to complete 30 hours of service in an organization that serves the homeless—a fairly easy quota to fulfill when you live in a city of more than 59,000 homeless men, women, and children. (In fact, this estimate is extremely low, because it does not include the number of people living on the street, nor the number of women and children in domestic violence shelters.)

The service component, it turns out, has prompted a healthy amount of internal conflict.

In response to Shilo’s predicament, another student in the class shared her ambivalence about the idea that volunteering helps the privileged become more aware of and sympathetic to those in need. “It’s service, but you’re just ultimately serving yourself,” she said. “I don’t have an answer to that dilemma.”

That may be, but educating and inspiring those who do service can still be useful, suggested another student. “Look at an organization like Part Of The Solution (POTS),” he said. “That’s how POTS began—[the founders]had an initial experience of service and then began that organization, which really does make a difference.”

The desire to “make a difference” is often what draws students to service, Greenfield said. In class, however, as they’ve begun to consider that desire, the students are learning that “making a difference” is a nebulous goal. Moreover, there seems to be a tacit power dynamic beneath their good intentions.

“Someone needs and someone is needed. Being needed feels good; being in need doesn’t feel so good,” Greenfield said. “That idea, to me, is important. Is there a way to do service that fosters equality rather than replicating the power problem that created the situation in the first place?”

One way to achieve that is to respect the autonomy of whoever is being served, she said. “Even a simple gesture [such as]saying ‘Can I help you?’ rather than ‘Let me help you,’ is a political change. It’s a move from ‘I’m going to do this’ to ‘Do you want me to do this?’ That’s how you can make a difference on the local level.”

Heroism and homelessness

Literature is an entryway into these kinds of conversations, Greenfield said. Many texts, such as Shakespeare’s King Lear and Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, exalt homelessness rather than view it as a social failing.

“The characters who fall socioeconomically ultimately rise as human beings. They become even better people,” Greenfield said. “There’s a certain nobility and integrity that comes from ending up at the bottom. It becomes a kind of heroic act to have fallen.”

And yet, that hardly serves as solace for someone living the trauma of homelessness. It still overlooks the question of whether one can ever alter the power struggle in the service dynamic—or, as Shilo wondered, whether it even matters if the end result still benefits the person being served (or at least does not cause harm).

“I always find when I teach this course that there’s a place at which my brain just stops. I can’t get beyond some of these questions,” Greenfield said. “It’s not like reading literature and discussing, where you have a eureka moment and reach some kind of conclusion.”

There’s no clear-cut answer, unfortunately. Greenfield cautions her students about this upfront: “Unless we ourselves have been homeless, we cannot presume to understand the trauma,” she wrote in the course syllabus. “But we can open ourselves up to learn about it and to work toward social justice.”

Sometimes, forming relationships are the only option available. To that end, stories are a good start.

“Literature is an exercise in imagining another person’s experience and being open to it,” Greenfield said. “To bring that kind of awareness and openness to people who you might normally just pass by and not even notice, it does change things.”

Dig in, Jane Austen fans. Fordham’s Susan Greenfield, Ph.D., associate professor of English and the author of Mothering Daughters: Novels and the Politics of Family Romance, Frances Burney to Jane Austen (Wayne State, 2002), has been writing about Austen for some time. In addition to her book, op-eds, and scholarly articles, Greenfield recently penned a weekly blog on Austen in the Huffington Post.