Being Is Good: A Soup Kitchen Thanksgiving

Thursday, November 26, 2009

A Soup Kitchen Thanksgiving

20091126-SoupKitchen
Originally uploaded by deacondana

A long, tiring, but enjoyable day. Diane and I, along with my brother, Jeff, who is visiting with us, were up bright and early this morning and at the Wildwood Soup Kitchen by 7 a.m. to begin preparations for our Thanksgiving Day dinner. We had a record number of volunteers who joined us as we cooked, delivered and served over 230 meals. As I mentioned in yesterday's post, it was a traditional Thanksgiving dinner, complete with all the fixin's. Our guests, young and old and in-between, all seemed to enjoy the day and were happy to take a lot of the leftovers home with them.

Yesterday I also mentioned that our local media folks stopped by the house to give the soup kitchen a little publicity. As a result there was a wonderful writeup in the local paper, The Villages Daily Sun. They also gave Diane and me some face time on our local TV station, VNN, letting me ramble on about the nature of this wonderful ministry to those in need. My only complaint is that the TV folks didn't include my appeal for donations. I've included a video clip (above) of the local news show.

My other complaint is that I was so busy I didn't have time to sample the wonderful meal that Diane and her team of kitchen volunteers put together. This, I suppose, is a good thing since my waistline has been somewhat unstable in recent weeks and needs to settle down...way down.

Here are a few photos of some of our wonderful guests, along with the volunteers who made the day such a success...