Havre Community Thanksgiving dinner draws big crowd

One of the biggest annual holiday events of the year, the Havre Community Thanksgiving dinner appears to have been a massive success in 2022, drawing enough people to fill the St. Jude Parish Center, and plenty of volunteers to serve them.

The dinner has been going on in Havre for decades, funded by anonymous donors, serving people a Thanksgiving meal for free, including all the traditional staples, turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, corn pumpkin pie and more.

Unfortunately, they had to cancel the event in 2020 due to the pandemic, fearing for the safety of the people they wanted to serve.

In 2021 they still played it safe, opting to deliver meals and using take-out instead of serving in-person.

This year, however, the event was back and in-person at the parish center, and appears to have been a huge success.

Dinner organizer Debbie Rhines said they got so many volunteers Wednesday, when they were preparing much of the food, that almost everyone got to head home by 6 p.m., which is really good time.

"We got so many people," she said.

Among the volunteers was Lorraine Larson, who said it was her first time volunteering for the event.

She said she worked primarily on the delivery meals Wednesday night, and they ended up making more than 400 of them while others worked on carving the birds for the next day.

She said they got lots of good volunteers and she thinks everything went really well.

Another volunteer was Jon Swan, a Havre native who flew back from his home in Boston to see his mother, Anne Swan, and volunteer at the dinner, one that he and his family have been supporting and attending for decades now.

"This was tradition back then," he said. "I used to come here with her when I was growing up."

Swan said that, when he was a child, he washed dishes for the event, and now he's back with his own children to help serve coffee, pie and more.

During the dinner, volunteers, when they could, sat down with the people who attended, and talked with them, met new people and enjoyed the holiday.

Rhines said fellowship is a big part of this event, and she was hoping to get enough volunteers that they could afford to take some time to sit down with people in the community to talk and share time withthem.

The dinner also featured live harp music, their first musical act in many years.