Annual dinner now in its 19th year
Platte Valley Helping Hands (PVHH) is gearing up for their 19th annual Free Thanksgiving Dinner.
The dinner will be held from12:30 to 2 p.m. on Thanksgiving day, Nov. 27, at St. Anne’s Parish Hall, 218 Spring Ave., Saratoga.
The dinner service is not affiliated with the church, they only provide the space.
This year’s menu includes roast turkey and dressing, baked ham, mashed potatoes and gravy, sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, green peas, beverages and pumpkin pie for dessert.
Take-out dinners are available, and those who want meals to go can call to place their order starting at 11:30 a.m. on Thanksgiving day.
Everyone is welcome to the dinner. PVHH member Gertrude Herold said the dinner generally includes a lot of families, including grandparents, parents and their children.
According Herold, the dinner caters to families who had a busy week and have not had the chance to fix a dinner, or groups looking for some holiday camaraderie.
Herold said all of the food is homemade and the ingredients are donated by people from the community. Volunteers with PVHH prepare all of the food, except the turkeys, at the parish hall starting the day before Thanksgiving. The Hotel Wolf donates the cooked turkeys.
On Thanksgiving day, volunteers gather at about 6:30 a.m. to begin preparing the food. The volunteers tend to get into the holiday spirit. Herold said, “everybody is in a good mood and we just have a fun time.” Anybody that wants to volunteer is welcome to come down to St. Anne’s Parish Hall and join in the fun.
In the past, they have had youth volunteers from Rawlins and the local Boy Scouts troop to help with the dinner.
PVHH has been together for more than 20 years. They now have seven board members and 10 to 15 volunteers, according to Herold.
“When we started helping hands, it was people in the community that just wanted to volunteer their time and [after a] couple of years we said ‘Hey, you know what we’d like to do, is we’d like to give the whole community a dinner’,” Herold said.
For more information on the PVHH Thanksgiving dinner, call Gertrude Herold at 326-5496, Merlin Hoopes at 326-8668 or Marilynn Verplancke at 326-8190.
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