In a Brookline kitchen that is a tight fit for two and packed with six, 900 meals are made to roll on Christmas Day.
The Church of the Advent has a congregation of just 20 to 30 worshipers, but their big hearts are contagious. They have been feeding the lonely and the needy on Christmas since at least 1951, as near as anyone can figure. The church also offers free meals on Wednesdays throughout the year.
About a decade ago, when Jacqueline Hohmann arrived, the church stepped up its Christmas game, and others followed. Today there really is such a thing as too many cooks in a kitchen — but only because the tight squeeze won’t allow for more.
When the parish administrator from Bethel Park began as a volunteer, there were a few delivered meals, a few pickups and a few people who came to eat in the dining hall alongside the kitchen. Ms. Hohmann took over the free holiday meals in 2008, and that year she began advertising in Brookline Boulevard storefronts and wherever else her flyers were welcome.
The calls began to come in and by 2009, a “few” turned into hundreds, and it was time to ask for help.
Neighboring St. Pius X Catholic Church and others in Brookline and Beechview came aboard — St. Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran, St. Catherine of Siena, Church of the Resurrection, Our Lady of Loreto, Tree of Life Open Bible Church — along with anonymous donors and volunteers helping with food and funds.
The Ministerium of Brookline sponsors the free meals, touted in a giant lawn sign that promises “Annual Christmas Dinner .. Free to All,” with a life-size manger scene as the backdrop.
Last year, they helped the Church of the Advent feed 770, mostly deliveries by more than a dozen volunteer drivers. If people fall outside just the area or arrive late — they usually stop serving and delivering around 4:30 p.m. — no one is turned away, Ms. Hohmann said.
Preparations were underway all day on the eve of Christmas, when Ms. Hohmann was at the church from 6 in the morning until 10 at night. Exhausted as she was, she opened gifts with her two grandchildren, then returned at 6 a.m. Christmas day to supervise the volunteers and hand out delivery assignments.
In her office just a few steps from the kitchen, she answered phone calls from people wondering when the food would arrive while also answering volunteers’ questions about where the large trash bags or salt and pepper could be found.
This year, nearby Pittsburgh Baptist Church delivered 100 cans of cranberry relish to go along with individual packages of turkey and gravy, ham, green beans, corn, a roll and butter and dessert.
The protein portions came from 30 hams and 30 turkeys.
Michael Roslonski, the turkey carver, came equipped with his own electric knife and cutting board. His wife, Kathy, and son Corey, also were on duty. The Bethel Park family, congregants at St. Gabriel, had been looking for a way to give back after their daughter left the fold and suggested they should try volunteering on Christmas. Mrs. Roslonski saw one of those storefront signs, called Ms. Hohmann in that first year, and her family has been helping out every year since.
“Jackie is a magician,” Ms. Roslonski, on a quick break from gravy duty, said of the feat of feeding hundreds of people.
Spending Christmas preparing meals for others “is our gift that we are given. We are blessed to be here,” she added before returning to her chores.
The Keblish family — Dan and Marie, daughter Maura and husband Ed Hilbert — of Castle Shannon also are annual volunteers. They started on delivery detail, “because I drive good in the snow,” said Marie, but they enjoy kitchen duties these days.
This year marked the first Christmas at Church of the Advent for the Rev. Kimberly Karashin.
About 10:30 a.m., more than four hours into the workday and as the first packaged meals were about to leave the building, Ms. Hohmann rang a bell in the dining hall, as has become the custom, and the Rev. Karashin led the assemblage in prayer.
They were taking part in what she had heard was a bit of a Christmas miracle. Later in the day, she was helping that miracle along, working amid an assembly line of eight — four on each side of a rectangular table in the corner of the dining hall - heaping slices of turkey into outgoing packages.
At noon, the first of the people who enjoy their free meals in the hall began to arrive. Last year, more than 100 meals were served at the church. The meals that are shipped mostly go to residents of Brookline, Beechview and Castle Shannon.
"We begin serving at noon and end at 4:30, but that doesn't always work,” Ms. Hohmann said of the timing. “I've been known to get home at 8 o'clock at night, because you just don't turn people away."
As she spoke of the work and “the beautiful people” bustling nearby, Ms. Hohmann kept referring to her “mentor” at the Church of the Advent, Margaret “Meg” Kaufman, who died in June 2017. The church recently dedicated a new chapel in her honor, and her sons’ families were among the volunteer drivers this Christmas.
Ms. Hohmann, a calming presence in a silver-studded holiday sweater set, fretted that the “awesome crew” cooking and cutting and packing and serving wouldn’t get its due if she was doing the talking.
She knows she is the one who receives all the thank-yous, but as the person who answers the calls of people in need, she also follows up with them and gets to know their troubles.
“If you need a good cry, pick up the phone and listen. But it’s a beautiful result,” she said of the free meals that were being served throughout the community. “That’s when you know you’ve really done something.”
Sharon Eberson: seberson@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1960. Twitter: @SEberson_pg.
First Published: December 26, 2018, 4:45 p.m.
