Across southern Maine, people are opening up their hearts and homes to others this Thanksgiving.

Ronald Spiller will probably spend Thanksgiving Day at his Westbrook apartment watching television. But he still got a chance this week to eat turkey with people he loves.

“Thanksgiving Day is Thanksgiving Day, but all the people here are my brothers and sisters. This is beautiful,” Spiller said Monday at a Thanksgiving dinner held at the Salvation Army on Bridge Street in Westbrook.

Though Thanksgiving is typically a time for families to get together, give thanks and feast on turkey and all the traditional fixings, that scenario doesn’t pan out for everyone.

Whether time, money or distance is the constraint, many people can’t make it to their homes for the holiday. Others don’t have any family to go visit. However, just because a person can’t spend the holiday with family, doesn’t mean they have to be by themselves.

“I felt there were a lot of people that were alone and needed to socialize,” said Linda Gordon, who started running the Thanksgiving dinners at the Salvation Army four years ago.

“This is the time when there’s a lot of depression. Being with others, it helps with that, to get through the holidays,” she said.

Michael Arenstam, who led a self-help group in Saco for 14 years, said going to a gathering of people is the key to getting out of a holiday funk.

People who are down and lonely, he said, tend to focus inward and on whatever is upsetting them to begin with.

“In order to break that, they need to talk to someone who isn’t focused on that,” he said.

Finding someone to talk – and dine – with over the holidays shouldn’t be too difficult. Across southern Maine, there are stories of people opening up their hearts and homes to others.

Holiday hospitality

In 2006, the Rev. Jonathan Marshall, pastor of the White Rock Free Baptist Church in Gorham, put into solid practice the spiritual admonition of being hospitable to strangers.

With scripture verses in mind such as Romans 12:13 (“Share with God’s people who are in need. Practice hospitality”) and Hebrews 13:1,2 (“Let brotherly love continue. Be not forgetful to entertain strangers; for thereby some have entertained angels unawares”) as well as a simple desire to brighten someone’s holidays, the 52-year-old pastor and his wife, Ruth, opened their home during the holidays to one of his daughter’s friends from school.

In 2006, the Marshalls’ daughter Sarah was a third-year undergraduate student at Toronto Baptist Seminary & Bible College. Her roommate, Esther Gros-Desormeaux, was a long way – both physically and emotionally – from her home country of Martinique, and couldn’t afford to make the trip for Christmas break.

So, rather than stay in her lonely dorm room through the family-focused holiday, the roommate hopped in Sarah’s car and headed to the Marshalls’ snowy homestead in Hiram, spending three weeks with the pastor’s family.

“It would have cost many hundreds of dollars to go back home to Martinique, so we invited her to come to our house. She had never seen that much snow,” Marshall said.

Ruth Marshall said the experience still lingers in their minds. Their hospitality, she said, wasn’t only a blessing for Gros-Desormeaux, it blessed the Marshalls, as well.

“We went skiing and skating and we just had a wonderful time,” Ruth Marshall said. “She still calls us Uncle and Aunt.”

In 2006, Marshall was assistant pastor at the Free Baptist Church of Limerick. In August of this year, however, he was called to the Gorham church, located on Route 114. The White Rock church, Marshall said, is strategically located halfway between two of southern Maine’s major student populations, St. Joseph’s College to the north and the Gorham campus of the University of the Southern Maine to the south.

So, with the memory of that visit of 2006 still in his mind, the pastor broached the subject with the church’s board of deacons about a month ago, asking them if the church would contemplate inviting students from the two schools to spend Thanksgiving and Christmas with members of the church family. The deacons gave approval and Marshall has since visited the two schools, speaking with officials in student affairs offices, offering his church as a holiday haven for those who live far from home.

Marshall said he has a two-fold purpose in extending Christian hospitality. First, he “knows it’s a drag to spend that time of year away from family,” and that spending the holidays “in a family setting is better than spending it in a dorm.” Secondly, he wants to see “more interaction between the church and the colleges. There’s not much right now, and I’d like to see that change.”

Plus, inviting college students for the holidays is a practical way of incorporating hospitality in their lives, as the Bible commands.

“If we can accomplish something similar (to the experience we had with their daughter’s roommate), then it would be worth every bit of the effort,” Ruth Marshall said. “To be able to bless another college student, and to know that we will honor God in the process, that’s obedience to what he has instructed us to do.”

Several families in the church have also stepped up to practice hospitality, and have agreed to welcome students at the holidays. Taking them in consists of more than just a holiday meal, too. They’re prepared to host students for several weeks during the January break.

“We have several families who are willing to host students,” Marshall said. “It’s just a matter of us making that known to the colleges and opening up that opportunity to the students.”

According to John Blanchard, assistant dean of student life at St. Joseph’s, the church’s offer is a welcomed one. He said there are students who live far from home and could use a place locally to go for the holidays. Now, it’s just a matter of linking any students needing a holiday haven to the families.

Longtime White Rock church member Nancy Sampson, one of the church members who signed up to welcome students who need a little holiday cheer, is excited about the prospect.

“It’s that time of year,” said Sampson, a resident of the White Rock section of Gorham, “and we want to extend the doors of our family and just welcome anyone who doesn’t have someone to spend the holidays with.”

– John Balentine

Getting more by giving back

When Thanksgiving was just a family affair for Debi Hubbard, it wasn’t much fun. But now that the South Portland resident and her relatives spend the day cooking and serving dinner to more than 200 community members each year, she really enjoys the holiday.

“I love it,” Hubbard said of the free Thanksgiving dinner that she, family and friends, and other volunteers host each year for the elderly, the needy, and anyone else in the city and surrounding communities who wants to attend. “For me, it’s like giving everybody a Christmas present. It makes you feel good inside.”

On Thanksgiving Day, the 14th annual community dinner will be served at V.F. W. Post No. 832 at 50 Peary Terrace in South Portland. The dinner, served from noon until 3 p.m., features turkey and all the traditional fixings. Everyone who shows up is served, Hubbard said.

“It’s a good meal,” she said. “It’s a homemade meal … We don’t do out of the box.”

Prior to hosting the community dinner, Hubbard and her husband and their three sons used to spend the holiday shuttling between her parents in Bath and his in South Portland. Her mother would complain: “How come you’re not eating?” But they couldn’t eat much when they had to swallow two Thanksgiving dinners on one day.

Then in the fall of 1996, Hubbard, a financial services representative at Evergreen Credit Union, her friend and co-worker Judy Levesque, and a couple other women, thought up the idea of spending Thanksgiving cooking and serving a feast for others instead.

The first dinner was held at what was then the South Portland Eagles club at 729 Broadway. About 200 people showed up.

“I was petrified,” Hubbard recalled. But everyone got served and the meal became a community tradition. It moved to the V.F.W. hall seven years ago.

Hubbard and Levesque, two of the founders, continue to put on the dinner each year, helped by friends and family and dozens of community volunteers who do everything from baking pies to serving the guests – the dinner is a full-service meal, not a buffet – and cleaning up afterwards.

“One gentleman who comes every year, he does the dishwashing,” Hubbard said.

A volunteer driver also goes around each year in a city school bus picking up dinner guests who can’t get to the meal on their own, such as the elderly. For people who can’t leave their homes, the meal gets delivered to them.

Sponsors of the dinner include the credit union and the South Portland Police Patrolmen’s Association, which pays for much of the food. And other businesses and organizations help out. For example, the Hannaford Bros. supermarket chain is donating some turkeys this year, Hubbard said, and the V.F.W. is donating the centerpieces for the dining tables.

Hubbard said that last year’s dinner, deep in the economic recession, drew the most guest so far – 250.

This year, with the economy still down, there could be more. Hubbard said she can’t estimate the numbers. However, she said, “I know it’s going to be big.”

Sybil Riemensnider, director of the South Portland Food Cupboard, said late last week that the food pantry has given out 274 flyers about the dinner to clients there.

She sent one flyer to a client who doesn’t drive. The woman was delighted to learn she could get a ride to the meal. “She was so thrilled she called me up and thanked me,” Riemensnider said.

The food cupboard, located in the basement of St. John the Evangelist Church at 611 Main Street in South Portland, had helped 252 families so far this month, Riemensnider said.

That’s a record number – she said the pantry usually serves about 100 families each month.

“People are out of work. They’ve lost their jobs. It’s such a bad time right now,” she said.

Although the pantry also has been giving out turkeys and also gift certificates donated by the South Portland Lions Club that enable families to buy turkeys, the dinner is also a huge help, Riemensnider said.

“I think it’s an absolutely wonderful thing,” she said.

It enables people to enjoy a free Thanksgiving meal in the company of others, instead of alone, said Riemensnider, who said the food pantry is helping Hubbard get the vegetables she needs for the dinner.

About two dozen turkeys will be prepared. The menu also includes stuffing, peas and onions, sweet potatoes, turnips and carrots. Dessert is lots and lots of pie.

Hubbard said, “99 percent of the pies I get are homemade, by members of the credit union and co-workers…People are still giving in the bad economy.”

Dozens of volunteers make all the work of the dinner possible.

The meal is cooked in the kitchen at the V.F.W. post, with the work starting the night before the holiday. That’s when hundreds of pounds of vegetables are peeled and cut up.

On Thanksgiving Day, Hubbard and the other cooks must arrive around 5:30 a.m. to start on the turkeys and get them in the oven.

By noon, the doors open to the public and the feasting begins. Guests typically include the elderly, individuals and families who are homeless or down on their luck, and police and firefighters on duty that day.

Volunteers help dish up the meal and bring out laden plates to the guests.

Hubbard said her family members are involved from start to finish, including her husband, her sons, her brother and sister-in-law from Bath and a niece. “And they work hard,” she said.

Her grandchildren also attend and her husband’s 94-year-old mother is one of the guests. The family dines with all the other guests, so there’s no need to prepare a meal at home – and no chance Hubbard has to eat two Thanksgiving meals on one day.

“I’d be too pooped,” she laughed. “Most Thanksgivings, I don’t even get to eat.”

– Tess Nacelewicz

Mary Nicely of Buxton receives a roll from Nancy Currier, topping off the Thanksgiving meal served up Monday at the Salvation Army on Bridge Street in Westbrook. (Staff photo by Leslie Bridgers)