HAVRE, Mont. (NMB) – For the first time since its inception 39 years ago, there will be no Havre Community Thanksgiving Dinner this year.
The annual event, organized by Dinner Chair Debi Rhines and funded by ‘The Anonymous Donor,’ provides hundreds of Thanksgiving meals to local residents, including many that are delivered to the homebound.
But Rhines says with the amount of volunteers they need, even a modified dinner could put people at risk of contracting COVID-19.
“We’ve been looking at this for about a month. We thought we could maybe do deliveries only and just get out to the community, the shut-ins and folks that look forward to the meal. But as we looked at the (COVID) numbers and the mandate from the Health Department stating that groups of 25 people were the cap…And we just don’t think we can do it safely. And we know that we get a lot of work done because we have a lot of volunteers.
Rhines said last year, they had around 147 volunteers over a two day stretch.
“We just had to take a step back and say ‘is this really a smart decision to have this dinner? Is it in the best interest of everybody regarding COVID?’ And the answer is no. We just have to take a step back.”
Rhines says although this was the right decision to make, Thanksgiving simply won’t feel the same in Havre this year.
“It’s such a huge impact for so many people. Not only the food, but the fellowship. It’s seeing people come together as a community. Seeing people that wesee once a year, or a long lost friend that you didn’t know was still around. There’s just so much that goes into the dinner. There’s so much fellowship and it’s huge…The sadness is there.”
With no community dinner this year, Rhines is encouraging people to reach out to their neighbors.
“People who are cooking for their own family, if they know of someone in their neighborhood, or somebody who they know spends time alone, maybe they could reach out to them via the phone and offer a meal that they can leave at their doorstep. At this point in time, I think that’s the only advice I can give the community is that we care for one another in a very safe manner. We just can’t prepare a dinner in mass production and guarantee everyone’s safety.”
Rhines says she is looking forward to holding the dinner on Thanksgiving in 2021, provided it is safe to do so.
