Two Generations, One Thanksgiving – A mother, a daughter, and Hundreds of dinners on the North Coast
For many folks on Thanksgiving week, the meal will be possible, in large part, because of the efforts of a mother-daughter team – Kendra Hall and Galena Flores. On Monday, November 23, Galena Flores, Community Engagement at the Tillamook Family YMAC, will be handing out 500 complete meal Thanksgiving food boxes to families all across Tillamook County — everything a household needs to put its own holiday dinner on the table.
Flores, based in Tillamook, is organizing the giveaway countywide.
Three days later, on Thanksgiving Day, her mother, Kendra Hall, will be in the kitchen at Nehalem Bay Methodist Church, cooking a full community Thanksgiving dinner for 300 people with assistance from Big Shaun’s Smash Burgers and community donations.
Between the two of them, mother and daughter will help feed a good share of Tillamook County this Thanksgiving.
Hall is the Program Director for Senior Meals at Nehalem Bay Community Services, where the kitchen turned out 433 meals in October alone — served in-house, delivered hot to homebound seniors, and delivered frozen, the frozen ones packaged from leftovers so nothing goes to waste. Cooking for a crowd is her everyday work. But Thanksgiving is bigger: 300 meals in all.
On Wednesday, November 25, a hundred of those meals will be delivered to people in need in the Tillamook area by Shaun of Big Shaun’s Smash Burgers — who is co-planning the dinner with Hall — and his wife. On Thursday, November 26, the other 200 will be served at the church fellowship hall, at seatings throughout the afternoon.
The dinner is a church function, sponsored by Nehalem Bay Methodist Church in partnership with Big Shaun’s Smash Burgers, and it is free. Volunteers from the community have been signing up to set up, serve, and clean up — some of them recruited, fittingly, by word of mouth over lunch.
Flores’s food boxes, earlier that same week, take a different approach to the same problem: instead of a seat at a table, families receive the makings of a Thanksgiving dinner to cook in their own kitchens, in their own homes.
It is, in the end, the same instinct in two generations — nobody nearby should go without a Thanksgiving dinner — expressed two ways: a box of ingredients for your own table, or a chair at ours. The Community Thanksgiving Dinner is Thursday, November 26, at Nehalem Bay Methodist Church, 36050 10th St, Nehalem. Seatings at 2:00, 2:45, 3:30, and 4:15 PM. Free; sign-ups help the kitchen plan — reserve a seating at
https://www.signupgenius.com/go/20F0C4DAAA92AA1FFC52-67443231-community. Walk-ins welcome as space allows. Donations may be sent to the church or dropped off at either Big Shaun’s Smash Burgers location (at Mohler Co-op or Rockaway Beach.)
For more about the food boxes, to be picked up at the Tillamook YMCA on Monday, contact Galena at gflores@tillamookymca.org.
