Tad and Margaret Kramar will set an extra place at their Thanksgiving table this year.

The Kramars, who live near Big Springs, will have a guest from Japan who is part of Kansas University’s 49th annual Thanksgiving Homestay Program.

“We like to share what we have,” Margaret Kramar said. “The thought of someone from another country sitting in their dormitory while everybody else is together is kind of sad. We just wanted to hopefully show someone what an American Thanksgiving is like.”

In the Betty Grimwood Thanksgiving Homestay Program, which was renamed in 1999 for the Burns resident who started the project, international students will spend all or part of Thanksgiving weekend with families across Kansas.

This year, 32 of KU’s 1,700 international students are participating, said Carol Dias da Silva, program coordinator with KU’s Office of International Student and Scholar Services.

“A lot of them just go to class and meet American students,” she said. “Most of them have never experienced Thanksgiving before. Some of them don’t even know what it is.”

Dias da Silva said her office received about twice as many volunteer families as students who wanted to be in the program this year. She attributed that to better publicity in seeking families.

Mika Yamada, a graduate student from Japan, will be among the students who plan to eat a traditional American feast Thursday. Yamada will visit a family in Overbrook.

“I’m curious,” she said. “We don’t have Thanksgiving Day in Japan. I don’t really know what it is.”

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Yamada said people in Japan didn’t eat turkey, though she likes all the traditional American food that’s part of a Thanksgiving meal.

“I want to be an English teacher,” she said. “I’ll have a chance to talk about American culture when I go back to Japan. Language and culture are intertwined. You can’t separate them.”