The Team; The Party

In my note on 'Tis the Season I mentioned the Christmas dinner for those who haven't experienced a Canadian Christmas; well the party was on Saturday but before I tell you about it let me tell you about my lead into it.

I was asked to host a table with my parents. Although this sounds wonderful I knew I couldn't ask them because my Father has a HUGE role in getting the hundreds of hampers ready and distributed in Guelph and my Mother spends hours generating tax receipts for all the donations to the Guelph Salvation Army at this time of year; thus I was left on my own. But here's how the story unfolded; my friend from Scotland, Heather Ortiz,
who has a heart for God and missions, was scheduled to visit me during the weekend of the Christmas party and I knew she'd love to host with me. The real problem was as a hostess I was suppose to cook a turkey but I haven't done this before so I didn't think I should be experimenting with our guests. I mentioned this at work and Mark, my boss, said he'd cook it for me if I bought it. What Mark didn't know is Ranjit, another co-worker, had told me he and his son Rajiv would buy the turkey but they didn't want to cook it! Isn't it neat how it all comes together. I'm blown away with this generosity; especially since none of these guys are professing Christians. I also mentioned this turkey problem to Janet. Janet, is an "on fire" Christian and she was determined to cook a turkey for me too. You'd think one turkey was enough because I only neeeded to feed 10 people but hey, if God so leads who am I to say no! Then I hear more of Janet's story; her son-in-law John co-owns a Chinese restaurant in town so she asks him if he can get her a turkey for cheap. At that request John wondefully donates a mega turkey! Janet takes it to Sobey's to get weighed and it's 28 lbs!!!! This means Janet needs to be up in the middle of the night cooking turkey and we have tons of it!

Since the dinner is in Toronto I asked Mark and Janet if they'd carved the turkey so I could put it into warmers when I arrived in Toronto. Mark tells me that was the hardest part of the job and Janet flatly refuses to do it! (Sigh!) Fortunately Janet doesn't give up easily and she thinks "Chef Henri"! (her next store neighbour and my adopted brother) could come to the rescue; and thus he did.
So Saturday afternoon Heather and I begin our journey for supper via our turkey pickup spots; Cambridge and Hamilton. We finally arrive at the community hall in downtown Toronto and discover lots of helpful hands ready to help us setup the table. Oh ya, part of my job is to set the table nicely. Mark also volunteered his Christmas table decorations for this. He was a little apologeitc that his decore was more about snowmen than Jesus but I did notice the table cloth had churches on it! What we were missing were fancy dishes but my Father told me he had some donated to his office that were incredibly fancy (real gold trim!). I went over to check my Father's supplies to see what we could borrow and there it was, a snowman center piece! My Father also managed to supply us with table favours. Heather told me the tables were judged and we got a 10/10! Way to go team!


Now supper is about to begin; 10 of us crowd around the table and they're still trying to seat everyone; oops! There's what 30, 40, 50 ...extra people!!!??? Heather and I were quickly asked to surrender our seats to the guests! Yes, over 300 people showed up for dinner...and I still think Santa managed to remember every child!...and turkey; yes, we even had enough turkey to feed everyone; thanks to our 40+ pound supply of it!...and thanks to Janet's supply of paper plates I even got a plate to eat with!

John's restaurant; George's, kindly donated 2 Chinese calendars that I used as "table prizes". The person with the tape on the bottom of their cup got a prize! Well go figure, my whole table was Chinese! They could even read what the calendar said! They loved it!

Thanks everyone for pulling together and doing your part.