Are people searching for community this holiday season?

By KAREN PARKER | County Line Editor

After last Saturday’s community Christmas dinner in the Ontario Community Hall, a handful of folks asked me, “Who puts this thing on?”

I think I may have heard the same question last month at Norwalk’s community Thanksgiving dinner.

Usually I smile and say, “It’s just one of those small-town miracles.”

Most folks seem to have trouble grasping the concept that events can and do just happen. What? No organized group doing fundraising? How strange. How can that be?

Actually, for those of you who may have forgotten or never knew, the Norwalk event started 18 years ago as an attempt by the Friends of the Community to build understanding between the emerging Hispanic community and local residents. Not surprisingly, local churches led the way. If memory serves me correctly, the first events were in the basement of St. Augustine’s Catholic Church. With that space outgrown, the dinner has moved to the Norwalk Community Center.

The Friends of the Community group has faded away, but the concept of a community Thanksgiving dinner took root and grew. And grew and grew. This year, more than 300 people jammed the Norwalk Community Center, and those who made the mistake of arriving fashionably late went away unfashionably hungry.

Planning the food needed for these events is nearly impossible. Last year there were substantial leftovers, so the food was scaled back. Oops.

Many of the same faces show up each year to mash potatoes and lug heavy roasters of turkey to the serving table. Many of those faces also showed up to volunteer at Norwalk Rails-to-Trails Marathon earlier in the month. People seemto know their jobs and, by some miracle, they just show up and do it.

Ontario’s event dates back a dozen or more years and was the brainchild of Gary Withrow. It began in the restaurant with a few dozen people. Within a few years, folks were cheek by jowl, and the dinner moved across the street to the community hall. It seemed a vast space at first, but this year more than 200 people streamed into the hall.

When you consider that this was the last shopping Saturday before Christmas,that no entertainment was offered, and that the event provided no opportunity to win a raffle, listen to a guitar twang or load up on alcohol, it’s downright amazing.

I have been thinking about this turn of events lately, and I can only conclude that people are hungry for community.

So many things divide us: religion, politics, family squabbles and, yes, even the perpetual Facebook.

Facebook users pick their friends, and when they become annoying, they are de-friended, just like wedid in junior high.

Facebook is ballyhooed as the ultimate in keeping people in touch. But isn’t it really only half a conversation? It is not sitting and talking face-to-face and eye-to-eye. We cannot see one another shrug, roll our eyes, turn up our noses, or glare in anger. The inflection of a human voice often tells us more about what the other person is thinking than his or her words do.

Facebook allows us to babble about the trivial details of our lives. Talking in person forces us to listen to the other guy and abandon, at least for a time, our own self-obsession.

None of this is new. It’s what people did 75 years ago before they went into their homes and turned on the television.

Cynics would say people come to these events only for the free food. Really? Then why don’t they eat and leave? Why do they stay, some for hours, talking with their friends and neighbors? Is there another hunger we have that we have forgotten how to satisfy? Is it the arrival of the holidays that make us yearn for community?

When Charles Dickens wrote “The Christmas Carol” more than 150 years ago, he may have been thinking about this same thing.

“But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round — apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that — as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.”

Merry Christmas and happy New Year to all of our readers and friends.

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