While Homecoming is highly anticipated and celebrated here at the Big Green, it is just a slightly embellished football game at many other colleges -- if they even celebrate the weekend at all.
The Harvard-Yale football game is the closest that those two universities come to having an official Homecoming.
"We have the Harvard-Yale game, which is probably the only time the majority of students go to a football game," Harvard student Caitlin Anderson said.
Festivities include parties and barbecues, although Anderson insisted Harvard students "tend to get slightly less drunk" than Yale students do.
This year, buses filled with about one-third of Yale students will drive to Cambridge for the much-anticipated game, Yale student Ace Padian said. The event is always the last football game before Thanksgiving.
The rivals mock each other with chants such as "safety school" and "school on Monday," a favorite chant of Yale's which taunts Harvard students for having classes the following Monday while Yale students do not.
Traditionally, following the third quarter of the football game, about 50 students from Yale strip and run around the football field with their college's flag, attempting to avoid security guards, Padian said.
"In general we just try to make as much fun of each other as possible, and it's totally nuts," Padian said.
Yale student Alex Taylor said that the Harvard-Yale game has even been immortalized in the popular T.V. cartoon "The Simpsons." The writers of the cartoon, Harvard alumni, wrote one episode in which Mr. Burns, a Yale graduate, returns to Yale after his team has lost the important game.
While Harvard and Yale celebrate the football aspect of the Homecoming tradition, Duke University breaks football's monopoly on Homecoming by focusing on its basketball team. It also celebrates the weekend with dances, parties and alumni events,
Duke student Helen Wolff said students' celebration of Homecoming is "a little more reserved" than the festivities that occur if the basketball team defeats rival University of North Carolina.
When Duke wins the game, students, taking benches from the campus' main quad, build a bonfire and attempt to light it while avoiding campus security.
"Last year the bonfires were kind of a problem," Wolff said. This year the university may issue permits for students to build bonfires.
Cornell University, focusing on Homecoming's true meaning, caters more towards alumni during the weekend.
Cornell University student Ben Stein said the event focuses on the return of alumni who graduated 25, 20, 15, 10 and five years ago.
The university holds receptions, dinners, concerts and class meetings for the alumni, in addition to widely-attended tailgating parties for undergraduates and alumni before the football game.
Stein said the excitement about Homecoming usually depends on whether the football team has a winning record.
Princeton University does not celebrate any type of Homecoming, but students build a bonfire if the football team beats both Harvard and Yale in one season.
"That hasn't happened in a while," Princeton student Christine Whelan said. Princeton last won the "big three" in 1995.
Alumni return to Princeton in February for Alumni Day, rather than Homecoming. They also attend reunions in late May before graduation.
Undergraduates hold an afternoon of lawn parties in the fall, as well as several formal events at eating clubs in the spring.
