Keeping Angela's Thanksgiving special
Angela Bryant, an outwardly unassuming and reserved woman, is immensely strong inwardly, especially for her children. The single mother puts them above everything else.
She and her children are survivors of domestic violence. After escaping to a family shelter, Angela quickly worked hard to make a new life and find housing for herself and her two kids, Amiya and Andre.
It’s been five years since starting over. Angela works as a nurse and makes ends meet. She’s been able to keep her family in the same apartment and build stability and a sense of home. But there are obvious drawbacks to being a single mom with two kids, one of which is a tight budget. And a tight budget can be especially restrictive during the holidays.
Angela quickly realized that with the rising prices of both housing and food, their Thanksgiving celebration was going to have to de-emphasize the meal. She even thought about skipping it.
“Thanksgiving was probably going to be pretty pitiful,” she said. “We would have still enjoyed the family time, but we definitely would have really been lacking that good home-cooked meal.”
However, she remembered an organization that helped her with a food box five years before when she moved out of a family shelter, into her new home and didn’t have money for groceries. That organization was St. Vincent de Paul.
She got into contact with the SVdP Vincentian volunteers stationed out of St. Matthew’s Catholic Church in her neighborhood. It turns out the Vincentian volunteers and their pantry could bring a lot more than just a little help.
Just a few days before Thanksgiving every year, the Vincentian volunteers pack holiday food boxes full of all the holiday essentials: Mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, fall vegetables, and of course, a full turkey.
One of those boxes was made specially for Angela, and they brought it over on a home visit just a few days before Thanksgiving, so she had time to thaw the turkey and prepare a traditional Thanksgiving meal.
Angela made her overwhelming gratitude clear to the Vincentian volunteers and the rest of SVdP who make the holiday food boxes possible:
"Thank you, thank you. You have been such a big help, such a blessing. And now we're gonna have a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner, and I'm looking forward to it,” Angela said, her eyes on the verge of tearing up. “It's been such a help, because I don't know what we would have done. I really don't. I've been working as much as I can, just trying to maintain, but this has been a big help. So I highly appreciate it. Thank you."
