In the spirit of respect for each other and for the planet fostered by the late Pope Francis’ 2015 encyclical “Lau dato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home,” this year’s annual Thanksgiving dinner at Columbus St. Aloysius Church will be an environmentally friendly event.
“Warren Wright of the St. Vincent de Paul Society approached me after last year’s dinner about switching from plastic plates and utensils to having the same items made from more environmentally sustainable materials,” dinner chairman Sandy Bonneville said.
“So, at this year’s dinner, all those items will be biodegradable. Warren will bring in a receptacle to collect them and then place them in a pile to be turned into compost.”
The dinner will be from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Thanksgiving Day, Thursday, Nov. 27 at the parish, 2165 W. Broad St. Bonneville said it has taken place for more than 50 years and thinks it’s her 29th year as its coordinator.
“That’s just a guess,” she said. “It’s been running for so long I’m not sure anyone knows when it started. I’ve been involved with it most of that time. I began helping the late Steve Joyce, who started it, just got more into it as he got older and eventually began running it.”
Each year, more than 1,000 dinners are served either at the parish hall or through takeout or delivery to homes and to people living on the streets and in homeless camps in the Hilltop and Franklinton areas of Columbus’ west side, where the church is located. The Columbus Folk Music Society has been part of the event for the past decade and again will provide entertainment.
Many turkeys for the dinner will be provided by the Fry Out Cancer organization, which since its founding in 2014 has donated more than $260,000 from turkey sales to the James Cancer Research Hospital and Solove Research Institute at Ohio State University and to Nationwide Children’s Hospital. A $500 donation this year from the Knights of Columbus of Grove City Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church was one of several donations that also help cover expenses.
Among volunteers serving at the dinner will be the five Sisters of Our Lady of Kilimanjaro who live in the former St. Aloysius rectory.
The Martha Circle, a women’s group affiliated with The Catholic Foundation, will bring pies. Coats and blankets from drives collected respectively by Columbus St. Mary Magdalene and Hilliard St. Brendan the Navigator churches will be available and the Ladies Ancient Order of Hibernians will have warm socks for anyone who asks.
Fry Out Cancer, led by Matt Freedman of New Albany, became involved with the dinner through Bonneville’s son, Dr. Russell Bonneville Jr., a cancer researcher at OSU who now is at the University of Michigan as a fellow in hematology and oncology. He will be in Columbus for a period before and after dinner, at which he has helped since childhood. His father, Sandy’s husband Russell Bonneville Sr., played a key role until his death in 2017.
Bonneville said local chef Tim Miller and his family also have been important to the event’s continued success. “For about the past six years I couldn’t have done it without them,” she said.
“When I started volunteering, we may have served 100 meals. Now it’s up to 1,000 and the need continues to grow,” said Bonneville, who also is active in the Taking It to the Streets ministry of St. Aloysius and St. Mary Magdalene churches, which distributes more than 100 meals a week to those without homes in Franklinton and the Hilltop.
“So many people come year after year to the dinner that it’s become a neighborhood in itself, like a big family with mostly members who are poor,” she said. “I think of it as a quilt of poverty with each patch representing a different situation, each stitch a different need, with the dinner one of the things that knits the neighborhood together.
“You’d think that with a hall filled with people, it would be pretty noisy, yet when they come here, it’s like they were in church, the atmosphere is so reverent. Maybe the presence of the sisters, the recognition by people that God’s work is being done here and the mutual respect being shown to everyone has something to do with it.”
Another long-running Thanksgiving dinner in the diocese is that of Circleville St. Joseph Church, 134 W. Mound St., which is providing Thanksgiving dinners for home delivery or takeout this year for the 41st year.
Parish secretary Crista Kramer said more than 400 dinners of turkey, ham, green beans, stuffing, mashed potatoes, cranberries and milk usually are distributed each year. Help comes from about a dozen kitchen volunteers and many delivery volunteers, with money coming from the parish general fund and individual donors.
Pickaway County residents who call the church at (740) 477-2549 by Friday, Nov. 21 will have dinner delivered to their homes between 11 a.m. and noon on Thanksgiving Day. Dinners also will be delivered at the same times on Christmas Day, Thursday, Dec. 25. The registration deadline is Monday, Dec. 22.
The Community Kitchen at the St. John Center, 640 S. Ohio Ave., will serve dinner in its dining room on Thanksgiving Day from 10:30 a.m. to 1 p.m., said kitchen director M.J. McCluskey.
Columbus St. Dominic Church, 453 N. 20th St., will have a holiday lunch from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 19 in its hall and will distribute Thanksgiving food boxes beginning at 1 p.m. Monday, Nov. 24 to anyone requesting them, said building manager Sheila White. The turkeys are donated by St. Dominic parishioners and members of the New Albany Church of the Resurrection and Westerville St. Paul the Apostle Church.
The 28th annual “Bring a Turkey to Church” weekend will take place at St. Paul Church, 313 N. State St., after all Masses on Saturday and Sunday, Nov. 22 and 23. Large containers of Thanksgiving-related food and cash donations for the Community Kitchen also will be donated that weekend. In recent years, enough turkeys have been collected to allow the kitchen to distribute the excess to other agencies serving needy families.
The Church of the Resurrection, 6300 E. Dublin-Granville Road, is collecting frozen turkeys and donations for other items for the 18th year for Columbus St. Dominic and St. James the Less churches. Jude Luffler, a Columbus St. Charles Preparatory School student who is coordinator for the collection, said a large truck to receive the items will be parked outside the parish ministry center on the Saturdays and Sundays of Nov. 15 and 16 and Nov. 22 and 23. The goal is to collect more than 500 turkeys.
The Joint Organization for Inner-City Needs (JOIN), a diocesan agency at 578 E. Main St., Columbus, that serves the city and Franklin County, will receive boxes of food for distribution on the three weekdays before Thanksgiving from the Byron Saunders Foundation, a central Ohio organization that provides holiday meals annually to families in need, said JOIN director Lisa Keita.
The St. Francis Evangelization Center, 404 W. South St., McArthur, doesn’t have room to host a Thanksgiving dinner but gives about 500 Vinton County families a chance to have a family dinner at home through its annual Turkey Toss program. Eligible families come to the center and receive $50 food vouchers for use at Campbell’s Market in McArthur, the county’s only full-service grocery, said center director Ashley Riegel. Turkeys also are distributed to about 60 families who live in remote areas of the county.
The St. Vincent de Paul pantry at Logan St. John Church, 351 N. Market St., will distribute baskets with holiday dinner items on Sunday, Nov. 23 from noon to 1 p.m. to families who have registered for a basket.
Sunbury St. John Neumann Church, 9633 E. State Route 37, is part of a Christmas box drive sponsored by Big Walnut Friends Who Share, an outreach of churches in the Sunbury and Galena areas. The parish is collecting canned carrots, preferably in large (40- and 60-ounce) sizes and canned frosting for a Christmas meal, with other churches collecting other items. Anyone attending the church’s 9 a.m. Thanksgiving Day Mass is asked to bring canned or boxed foods for Friends Who Share.
West Jefferson Sts. Simon and Jude Church, 9350 High Free Pike, is collecting containers of instant mashed potatoes, gravy and stuffing, as well as monetary donations for meat, for the community’s Good Samaritan Food Pantry. The parish Knights of Columbus council is collecting winter coats, gloves and hats for the Bishop Griffin Resource Center on Columbus’ east side through Sunday, Dec. 7.
The pantry at Columbus St. James the Less Church, 1652 Oakland Park Ave., will distribute nearly 400 two-box food baskets for Thanksgiving, said Jeff Zehala of the parish St. Vincent de Paul Society. One box will contain turkey, produce, bread and eggs, with perishable items in the other. The items are donated by Resurrection and St. Paul churches and several other parishes and by Columbus St. Francis DeSales High School students.
Zoar Holy Trinity Church, 1835 Dover-Zoar Road N.E., in cooperation with the Tuscarawas Valley Ministerial Association, will distribute dinners on Nov. 23 to homes, workplaces, domestic violence shelters, firehouses and hospices. The dinners will be prepared at the church and include turkey, gravy, mashed potatoes, dressing, cranberry salad and pie.
New Lexington St. Rose Church, 309 N. Main St., is sponsoring its annual Turkey Trot 5-kilometer run or walk at 9 a.m. Thanksgiving Day in the parking lot of its former school at 119 W. Water St. Registration is $25 on the day of the race. The parish also is collecting food items on Nov. 23 for distribution the following day. The St. Vincent de Paul Society is providing turkeys with parishioners asked to donate the rest.
Both Zanesville parishes – St. Thomas Aquinas at 955 E. Main St. and St. Nicholas at 144 N. 5th St. – will be collecting nonperishable food items at weekend Masses on Nov. 22 and 23 and at the St. Thomas parish office from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. on the three days before Thanksgiving.
The St. Vincent Family Center of Columbus is collecting donations to support Thanksgiving meals for approximately 100 families and clients in its care, said development coordinator Carson Firestone. It also is running its annual Adopt A Family program, in which families or individuals receive information on a needy family, shop for items on the family’s wish list, wrap and label the gifts and deliver them to the center on a specified time and date. Gift packages will be assembled on Thursday and Friday, Dec. 4 and 5 and distributed on Thursday and Friday, Dec. 11 and 12.
To apply as a gift giver, go to https:// www.surveymonkey.com/r/AdoptAFamily2025. Monetary gifts may be made at any time online at www.svfs.ohio.org/donate or sent to St. Vincent Family Services, 1490 E. Main St., Columbus, Ohio 43205. For more information, contact Firestone at cfirestone@svfc.org.
The Scioto Catholic Community will serve dinner from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day at the Holy Redeemer Activity Center, 1325 Gallia St., Portsmouth. Carryouts will be available for those unable to attend.
The Lancaster Basilica of St. Mary of the Assumption, 132 S, High St., will collect nonperishable food and toilet items at its 9 a.m. Thanksgiving Day Mass to benefit the parish food pantry.
Columbus Christ the King Church, 2777 E. Livingston Ave., is conducting a novena to Christ the King through Saturday, Nov. 22. Its annual parish awards will be presented the following day at its 10 a.m. English and 12:30 p.m. Spanish Masses and will be followed at 1:30 by a celebration of the Feast of Christ the King at All Saints Academy on the parish campus. Thanksgiving Day Masses will be at 8:30 a.m. at both Christ the King and its sister parish, St. Thomas the Apostle Church, 2692 E. 5th Ave. Both will be in English and Spanish.