Committee is ready to serve dinner

To the editor:

Thanksgiving Day is fast approaching and the committee for the 31st annual Community Thanksgiving Dinner has been hard at work since mid-October.

As we experienced last year, the need for continued flexibility and caution is still true this year. Even though the temptation to skip last year’s dinner was strong, the committee unanimously agreed the dinner should continue.

And continue it did!

We served 525 Thanksgiving meals, and your enthusiastic support and compliments were a blessing to us all. We expect to serve even more meals this year.

We will again provide pre-packaged meals to those in the community who come to the parking lot of  Asbury United Methodist Church on Thanksgiving Day from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. to pick up a meal for themselves or the homebound. Using a no-contact drive-through delivery, the food will be placed in your vehicle and can then be taken to your own home. No advance reservations are needed or accepted; simply come to the church during the time frame and we will have volunteers to load it.

Since local health restrictions have discouraged our delivery to the homebound, we will ask you to be on the lookout for neighbors or shut-ins who might be alone and take care of their needs, too.

Hopefully, 2022 will see the return of the fun and fellowship of eating with other members of the community, but this year we again invite the community to share in this holiday tradition in a format that has been altered to accommodate safety and health concerns.

As our chair, Carol Smith, said last year, we are lovingly serving up “thankfulness and hope.”

We are serving that same recipe this year, too!

The welcome mat is out to our entire community.

Even if you are not part of this event, we hope your family shares a joyous and peace-filled day.

Dolphus Stephens

Community Thanksgiving Dinner Committee