BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (WIAT) – The Jimmie Hale Mission says Thanksgiving Day is its biggest service day of the year, and that level of service takes a lot of preparation. Thursday, many people will be sitting down to their tables to enjoy a Thanksgiving meal with friends and family but for some people, the holiday is lonely, and it can be questionable if they’ll have a meal to eat.
“Most of us begin to think, ‘okay, where are we going to have to go for Thanksgiving, what are we going to have to bring, how much travel is going to be involved, how hard is it to get all of the family together,’ all of those kinds of things,” said James Poe, the Shepura Men’s Center director at Jimmie Hale. “But for the people that we’re going to be bringing meals to [Thursday], this may be the only person they even see on Thanksgiving. And for our guys that are here on our program, nobody ever wanted to be at the Jimmie Hale Mission on Thanksgiving. That wasn’t on anybody’s bucket list.”
The Jimmie Hale Mission will serve around 1,200 meals on Thanksgiving day between the meals served up to clients and the boxed meals delivered to Meals on Wheels recipients. That number of meals requires a lot of food and a lot of preparation…