Volunteers at First Presbyterian Church of Greensburg offered free Christmas Day meals for the third year in a row Monday morning.

This year about 60 volunteers spent Friday, Saturday and Sunday before Christmas prepping food, containers and transportation to serve approximately 650 meals to residents in surrounding communities including Hempfield, Jeannette and Greensburg.

“In prep days, which is about two days before hand, about four to five hours on those days,” said Scott Sucke, chairperson of the church mission committee. “Then (Christmas Day) is the big day. We started at 6 a.m. this morning and we’ll go until 4:30 this afternoon.”

Sucke heads the operation along with the church’s monthly Second Sunday Supper, a meal program similar to Monday’s project, but with about 350 deliveries rather than 600. Throughout the day, 18 volunteer drivers make deliveries to individual homes and residential communities.

“We’ll be doing home deliveries to people and we’ll also do a lot of high rises like Hempfield Towers, Jeannette Manor, Pershing Square, Penn Towers,” Sucke said. “Those are ones where people aren’t able to get out and we go to them.”

Styrofoam boxes and paper bags lined tables in the church dining hall as volunteers formed an assembly line packing meals. Working in harmony, others filtered in and out of the room replenishing bags and helping kitchen staffers bring out more food.

The main goal of the day is to make sure that all dinner receivers are well-fed. Sucke said that meals always include a salad item, this year’s being fruit cocktail, a protein, a starch, two vegetables, a dinner roll with butter and a dessert.

“We have a belief that we give big portions because that’s what needs to happen,” Sucke said.

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