Area churches offer Thanksgiving dinner

JEFFERSON – A Thanksgiving dinner, complete with all the trimmings, was offered by area churches Thursday, welcoming guests with food and fellowship.
In Jefferson, Delores Davenport and her granddaughter, Joy McFadden, took advantage of the turkey dinner offered at Hurdtown United Methodist. New to the area and living next door to the church, Davenport thought Thanksgiving would be “a good day to reach out to people and make friends,” she said, adding that the food was “wonderful” and the church offered a beautiful setting for a holiday dinner.
Volunteers from Hurdtown shared dinner duties with their counterparts from The United Methodist Church of Lake Hopatcong with both churches acting as host at the event. According to Paul Zorn, pastor at both churches, his congregants made the decision two years ago to begin offer a free Thanksgiving meal, feeling there was a real need in the community to reach out.
“Sometimes people will be alone,” he said. “An awful lot of folks are having trouble making ends meet,” he added. This was the second year for this event at Hurdtown.
For first-time volunteer Jacob Romeo, 10, helping people that “don’t really have family to go to” and making sure they had food made his Thanksgiving rewarding.
“I will come back next year,” he said.
Approximately two dozen meals were served at Hurdtown on Thursday, said Pastor Zorn, adding that a few meals were delivered to people who were unable to make it to the church. The leftovers would be delivered to the Market Street Mission in Morristown he said.
A power outage in Hopatcong, the result of Wednesday’s snowstorm, created a bit an issue for the seventh annual Thanksgiving dinner hosted by three