ROBESONIA, Pa – What was your first meal of 2026?<\/p>\n
“Lotta beans, lotta sauerkraut and a lot of pork,” said volunteer Steve Miller.<\/p>\n
And hopefully, a lot of luck for those who ventured out to places like St. Paul’s United Church of Christ in Robesonia and Brecknock Township Fire Company for a traditional New Year’s Day dinner.<\/p>\n
“We did over 200 pounds this year, and that’s a three-day process,” Miller explained.<\/p>\n
New Year’s Day dinners like these mean a lot to the myriad of churches, fire halls, and other places that serve them.<\/p>\n
“This is our third biggest fundraiser, and everybody likes it. It’s a tradition,” Miller said.<\/p>\n
The heaping, steaming holiday helpings do more than just fill the stomach on the first day of the new year.<\/p>\n
“I don’t have any family left anymore, so this is the next thing, and I like to support churches,” said Janice Kingkinger of Sinking Spring.<\/p>\n
Some of these dinners really bring out the big crowds, and that’s the case here in Brecknock Township, where they’re working with a skeleton crew of volunteers to keep this New Year’s Day tradition alive.<\/p>\n
“We serve between 200 and 350 people. Normally, we have a lot of takeouts. I’m not sure how many we hit so far, but we’re very busy,” said Merry Swavely, a volunteer.<\/p>\n
Holiday support in both directions.<\/p>\n
“We need all the fundraising we can get, so this is one of our bigger fundraisers,” she said.<\/p>\n
And so, another year starts – like those in the past – with some pork, sauerkraut – and a big helping of hope.<\/p>\n
“As long as the people are happy and we keep ’em fed, we are good.”<\/p>\n
Happy New Year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ROBESONIA, Pa – What was your first meal of 2026? “Lotta beans, lotta sauerkraut and a lot of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":76079,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[349,18221,28,128,130,129],"class_list":["post-76078","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-reading","tag-berks-county","tag-new-year","tag-pennsylvania","tag-reading-city","tag-reading-city-headlines","tag-reading-city-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76078","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76078"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76078\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/76079"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76078"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76078"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76078"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}