Paper Mill Elementary School fifth grade students, Kaitlin Price, Antonio Phaneuf, Shea Byrnes, Cole Davignon, Jimmy Krupiensk and Angela Bongiovanni deliver a push cart full of food to a waiting van from the Westfield Soup Kitchen during a school-wide food collection drive yesterday. The month-long collected netted 630 food items. (Photo by Frederick Gore)
WESTFIELD – The Westfield Soup Kitchen is preparing to host it’s annual Thanksgiving dinner at it’s Meadow Street location on Thursday.
According to Edward Fournier of the organization’s Board of Directors, the Thanksgiving meal will be held at noon instead of the usual 5 p.m.
“We put on a meal every night except Saturday all year long,” he said, adding that the meals are put on by volunteers. “I’ve put up a sheet toward the end of September, early October on the wall here for people to sign up and come in to volunteer.”
Fournier said that, over the past week and a half, the sheet has been filled with names, to the point that he doesn’t need any more help putting on the Thanksgiving feast.
“We’ve got people coming in Wednesday night at 6 to come in and set up the tables and peel the vegetables,” he said. “Thanksgiving morning, I have people coming in at about 10 to get the hors d’oeuvres table set up with the mashed potatoes and vegetables. Then we have people coming in at 11:30 to work on the serving line.”
Sophia Roselli, Sophia Franco and Abby Menzel, fifth-graders in Kristen Callini’s class at Southampton Road Elementary school, pack up some of the more than 900 food items their class collected throughout the school during the past two weeks. The food was donated to the Westfield Food Pantry. (Photo by Carl E. Hartdegen)
“We’ll need about five or six turkeys cooked up, so we’ll have people to do that,” he said. “And then we’ll make the gravy out of the meat and the dressing.”
Fournier added that the Soup Kitchen is still taking donations for the meal, including turkeys, potatoes and vegetables.
Volunteers are even signed up to wash dishes for the meal’s patrons. Fournier estimates the average attendance of the annual Thanksgiving feast hovers around 60 people, but is unsure whether there will be a spike in attendance
“We have people who come in on Thanksgiving who don’t come any other time of the year,” said Fournier. “And then we have people who come in year round to eat, but then on Thanksgiving they get invited to friends or families, so they don’t come in.”
