Volunteers sought to serve Christmas dinner

With little more than a week to go before Christmas, organizers of Holton’s annual Community Christmas Dinner are hoping for the gift of a few more people to help out with the dinner.

“I still need people in the kitchen, and I need all the servers,” said Freda Galer, who has helped to put the annual community Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners on for several years.

This year’s dinner is set from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 25 at the Evangel United Methodist Church Family Life Center. The dinner is open to all, regardless of age, religious affiliation, income bracket or residence.

Those who participate in the dinner have the option of dining in, getting a carry-out dinner or having one delivered to their home. But as far as putting in an advance order for a dinner is concerned, Galer said she needs to know by 10 p.m. on Christmas Eve.

“Every year, there’s somebody who calls me at home at 8 or 9 a.m. on Christmas Day, and if they called the church, they got an answering machine,” Galer said. “I’ll check the messages when I get up in the morning, and I can always call them from the church.”

Dinner organizers have “done really well” on food donations thus far, she said, but a few more food items are needed. Those include one gallon of instant potatoes, two gallons of corn, nine gallons of green beans, six gallons of sweet potatoes, 20 dozen rolls, 19 fruit or vegetable salads, 10 Jell-O salads and seven pies.

But what the dinner needs is volunteer manpower, Galer noted.

“We still need one more person to cook turkey,” she said. “We also need one or two people to help unload a pickup for the setup the evening before the dinner. We need cookers and servers, and we also need a couple of people for the deliveries.”

Last year’s Christmas dinner — the first held at the EUM Family Life Center after being held for several years at the St. Dominic Catholic Church Parish Hall — saw a record of 409 dinners being served. Galer said that with the right number of food donations and volunteers, she is hoping to meet or exceed that number this year.

“I’ve heard from several families who weren’t there at Thanksgiving, and they are planning on being there at Christmas,” she said.

Galer may be contacted at 364-4160 for more information about food donations or volunteer work with the dinner. Cash donations are being accepted to help defray the dinner’s costs; contact Francis DeVader at 364-2507.