{"id":73380,"date":"2025-12-02T21:09:16","date_gmt":"2025-12-02T21:09:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/73380\/"},"modified":"2025-12-02T21:09:16","modified_gmt":"2025-12-02T21:09:16","slug":"community-shares-in-thanksgiving-meal-gazette-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/73380\/","title":{"rendered":"Community shares in Thanksgiving meal \u2013 Gazette News"},"content":{"rendered":"

CONNEAUT \u2013 Organizers of the Community Thanksgiving Dinner at Corpus Christi Parish Hall weren\u2019t quite ready for the response they received as they planned the event.
As it turns out, about double the number of people than what was planned for reserved a meal, and the volunteers behind the event couldn\u2019t have been happier.
\u201cIt\u2019s really been quite an experience for us,\u201d Grace Tuuri, chair of Corpus Christi Parish outreach mission Matthew 25, said. \u201cIt\u2019s just been a blessing for us to be able to do it for as many people as we are because what we figured was going to be 250 is 500. Once they announced they were cutting off the SNAP benefits, we got like a hundred calls the following Monday. People were worried. It\u2019s been a real blessing for us to be able to do this. We really didn\u2019t expect this many people.\u201d
The community was grateful for a Thanksgiving meal that included turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes and gravy, green beans, cranberry sauce, a roll and a slice of pie
\u201cEverybody has thanked us and told us how good the food is,\u201d Tuuri said. \u201cThe stuffing is all homemade. Everything has been done by hand, except the pies. We baked 87 pies. I\u2019m not positive, but I think we did 26 turkeys. What we did was roast them and we would shred them. We had all the drippings. We saved everything, put it in the freezer, then we thawed everything, made the gravy, got the turkey all heated up, did the stuffing.\u201d
It took an army of volunteers to serve nearly 500 meals.
\u201cInitially this was co-sponsored by us and Good Shepherd Lutheran Church,\u201d Tuuri said. \u201cThat\u2019s the way we started out. Then we decided to see if we could get some other people involved, too. The Conneaut Human Resources Center has stepped in and helped out, CAMA (Conneaut Area Ministerial Association), The Salvation Army.\u201d
\u201cSome of the stores in town have helped out, Save A Lot, Orlando Brothers Golden Dawn, Our Lady of Peace Parish has given help,\u201d Tuuri continued. \u201cWe have a couple volunteers here today from a Baptist church, United Congregational Church, (Conneaut High School\u2019s) National Honor Society helped. We, really, had almost too many volunteers. It was just wonderful to see all these people come in. People from our parish have really stepped right up,\u201d Tuuri said.
The volunteers made the event.
\u201cWe didn\u2019t know what to expect as far as other churches, other groups, as far as how much they were going to want to help out with this,\u201d Tuuri said. \u201cWe weren\u2019t asking them for money or anything like that, but what they could do to help. Some of them donated money, some donated food, but it was the volunteers who came from out of all these other places. It\u2019s just amazed us, it really has.\u201d
Tuuri expressed gratitude toward those who helped.
\u201cWe\u2019re extremely grateful to Good Shepherd for wanting to step in and do this with us,\u201d Tuuri said. \u201cThey were instrumental in helping with this. Two people I really to thank are Patty Durkin, who chaired this event, and Faith Hotovec, our kitchen head.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"CONNEAUT \u2013 Organizers of the Community Thanksgiving Dinner at Corpus Christi Parish Hall weren\u2019t quite ready for the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":73381,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[155,157,156],"class_list":{"0":"post-73380","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-corpus-christi","8":"tag-corpus-christi","9":"tag-corpus-christi-headlines","10":"tag-corpus-christi-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73380","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73380"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73380\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/73381"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73380"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73380"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73380"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}