The pandemic will not stop Webb Center meal tradition
The Webb Community Center still plans to host its annual free Christmas Day dinner for the public from noon to 2 p.m. Friday, but this year the meals will be to- go only due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
For the past seven years, the center, located at 127 Pleasant St., has hosted the event, which was started by the late Nathaniel L. “Bob” Freeman, who served as the center’s board president until he died in 2016. The dinner has been held in his honor ever since.
“Every year for the last six or seven years we have fixed Christmas dinner for the less fortunate, and we started because of Bob Freeman,” Mary Moore, the current board president, said. “I’m not going to let the pandemic take this from us.”
In the past, the center opened its doors and offered the community a place to eat the meal together, but with the pandemic still going on, they opted to give out to-go plates at the doors of the center.
The center will be providing traditional turkey meals, and Moore said they have enough food to feed 300 people. They will also give out hand sanitizer and masks to those who attend the meal.
To buy the food, Moore asked local churches and friends to help and the Webb Center received many donations despite the hard times of the pandemic.
“It almost made me cry. There’s still good in the world,” she said.
Many donated money, but
Moore said they also received a lot of turkeys. “Some people donated turkeys — fried turkeys, smoked turkeys — there’s a variety,” she said.
“It just makes you want to cry. Everybody has hard times now,” Moore said, but people still came together to help the needy.
“It’s just beautiful,” she said, noting she never had any doubts about continuing the meal this year.
She said she asked the board if they could hold the meal again, and they agreed to it.
“We didn’t have a second thought. We’re a community center, and we love our community,” Moore said. “We’re not going to cancel Christmas dinner, because the people still need to eat on
Christmas Day.”
Moore noted the forecast calls for a bitterly cold Christmas Day; wind chills are predicted to be around 16 degrees that morning, according to the National Weather Service.
“I’ve been praying so hard this morning,” she said, because since they can’t let the public into the center to eat, some people may end up having to eat outside.
“They can’t come in now, so you don’t know where they’re going to eat. Let it be warm, not cold,” Moore said. “It breaks my heart, we have so many homeless people and some are children, that’s just sad.”
Moore said she is praying God will make the weather be closer to 70 degrees than 17 degrees.