Volunteers grateful to be giving

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This article was published 27/12/2023 (1005 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Helping serve up a free dinner to the community is a Christmas gift, volunteers at the Westman and Area Traditional Christmas Dinner said on the busy holiday Monday morning.

“It’s adding to Christmas — it’s a gift to us,” volunteer Nguire Abernethy told the Sun in between slathering butter onto a stack of buns in the Keystone Centre kitchen.

Abernethy is one of many volunteers who had been at the Keystone Centre since 6 a.m. on Christmas Day, working to help prepare the annual free Christmas feast for Westman. She has been a volunteer at the dinner for 25 years, though she has had many different roles throughout the years.

She shared a story of volunteering with her husband for the dinner one year and the two were tasked with making all the mashed potatoes for the dinner.

“The two of us mashed 750 pounds of potatoes,” Abernethy said, smiling. “Because we were seasoned volunteers, they trusted us with the potato mashing.”

This year, she said, her family is away but even in the years that she hosted Christmas for her family, she would still come early to help out with the dinner.

Brian Fowell has also been helping with the dinner for many years, including when it was still being prepared and served out of a church on the corner of Eighth Street and Victoria Avenue.

He agreed with Abernethy that spending Christmas Day volunteering felt like a gift, though he said that people coming together to help others should happen more than once a year.

“It shouldn’t be just one day of the year that people are generous,” he said.

The dinner was started in 1985 on Christmas Day and only about 30 people attended that year. Since then the dinner has moved to locations with more capacity, such as Prairie Oasis, and finally to the Keystone Centre, where more than 3,000 meals are served on Christmas Day with the help of over 400 volunteers.

Every year the dinner is open to anyone in the community and this year was the dinner’s 38th year in operation. The sit-down meal was served in the MNP room at the Keystone and takeout orders were organized in the Manitoba Room, where volunteer delivery drivers picked up meals and delivered them around town.

A city bus had a route around the city to get people to the venue and more volunteers picked up people who weren’t on the bus route to bring them to the dinner.

Gladden Smith, who has been spearheading the event for 33 years, says the months of work leading up to the dinner are worth it for the feelings and sights he experiences on the day of the feast.

“This has been my Christmas for 33 years,” he told the Sun. “I come in here today and you see all of this up, and all the people, they’re all happy, they’re talking to people they don’t even know from all different walks of life.

“It’s just a good feeling.”

This year, Smith said, donations of food and money were good, and they had plenty of volunteers — some people were even calling early on Christmas morning saying they wanted to come in and help.

“Brandon, the sponsors here, and the volunteer community is amazing,” he said. “It’s such a good feeling to see how everybody comes together.”

Meanwhile, in the Manitoba Room, volunteers filled take-out containers with turkey and mashed potatoes while others filled hundreds of containers with coleslaw. Volunteer Paul Lee said he has been helping at the dinner for four years and said that since his adult children are with their spouses on Christmas Day, volunteering and meeting nice people to work alongside makes the day enjoyable.

Paul Maloney sits on the committee that organizes the dinner and said he has been volunteering for two years. His background in logistics has helped him organize the 1,500 and counting delivery orders. Paper bags filled multiple tables while volunteers filled boxes and kept them in hot boxes until delivery time.

“In previous years, they’ve tried to prep more, but we’re really trying to encourage people to come to the hall and have the meal with company,” he told the Sun in between organizing volunteers who were arriving to help deliver meals.

Maloney said the meal delivery is important for people in care homes and long-term facilities who can’t get to the Keystone Centre as easily. Plus, families attending the meal in-person can have their kids receive a gift as well, he added. Still, phone calls for delivery orders continued throughout the morning.

Back up in the MNP Room at noon, people who were waiting in line well before the official start time poured into the room, which was bustling with volunteers serving plates of food while live music filled the air with festive tunes.

Some families had been to the dinner before, like the Clyne family. This year was their first year back since the pandemic, but they enjoyed the opportunity this Christmas to take a break from cooking. Others like the Huntinghawks had never been to the dinner before but called the dinner a “happy time” with good food and music.

Doug Hiebert told the Sun that he had never been to the dinner before but he enjoyed seeing the community in the room on Christmas Day. This year, he said, it’s been tough to make ends meet, so coming out to the dinner was a way that his daughter could get a gift.

Meanwhile, from inside the volunteer room, Amanda Bray, coordinator at Helping Hands Centre, was helping to organize volunteers.

“It kind of leads naturally for my passion of feeding people,” she told the Sun about getting involved in helping with the dinner. This is her third year helping out on the big day.

She said this dinner is special because it’s held on Christmas Day, while most organizations host a meal in the days before Christmas. She said it’s great to see so many people from all different walks of like come out to volunteer and even families who make volunteering their Christmas Day activity.

Bray has made the Christmas Dinner her family’s Christmas routine too — she and her daughter were both volunteering all day.

“This is what we’ve decided to do,” she said. “This is our Christmas tradition.”

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