Caroline Neal
UNION GROVE — As many wind down from the week on Friday night, members of the Union Grove Methodist Church will be hard at work cooking turkeys in preparation for the 70th Annual Turkey Dinner.
The event, which is drive-thru only, serves as the church’s main fundraiser, with the proceeds from Saturday’s dinner going to a lift to help handicapped and elderly individuals get into the church.
It also marks the last Turkey Dinner for Chairman Jeff Just, who will be retiring from his position after 10 years.
“People have just come to know that it’s a very good meal, and you will not go away hungry,” Just said.
Though Just has served as chair of the dinner for the past 10 years, he has been involved in the event for 50.
As chair of the event, Just assigns people to roles and orders all the food. He orders the meat about eight weeks in advance and everything else about four weeks out from the dinner.
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The meal includes roast turkey, whipped potatoes, gravy, stuffing, creamed green beans, corn, coleslaw, dinner rolls, cranberries and pie.
This year, he ordered 1,320 pounds of turkey.
Just said the church will typically serve between 750 and 800 meals during the dinner.
When the dinner first started, the church hosted both a sit-down and a carry-out option.
Forty-two-year-old Christy Celeste, who has been working on the Turkey Dinner since she was five, used to be a server at the sit-down dinner.
“That was really cool because you got to see people in the community that you don’t get to see but once a year,” Celeste said.
But Just said they switched to drive-thru in 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We felt that we still needed to do the dinner, especially with COVID, to get people out and see what’s going on,” he said. “We also wanted to keep them very safe, so of course, coming into the church and picking up your meal was just not a way to do that.”
Church member Jodi Stough, who has been involved with the dinner for about 25 years, said they start talking about the event in August.
“It’s like Operation Turkey,” she said.
However, they don’t start cooking until a couple days before.
On Friday night, Just said they will cook about 18 of the turkeys and finish the coleslaw and cranberries; on Saturday, everything else is completed.
This year, Stough said she’s helping prepare turkeys.
“All day Saturday, we are up at the crack of dawn, washing and putting turkeys in the roasters, and it’s all homemade,” she said.
Indeed, Celeste, who for the past 20 years has been in charge of making the potatoes, said she starts working on them about three hours ahead of the event and is continuously making them until the dinner is done. This year, Celeste is planning for 900 servings of potatoes.
“I don’t sit down for six hours, at least. … I am constantly go, go, go. That mixer is going straight for all that time. It’s very intense, but it’s fun,” she said.
For Stough, the Turkey Dinner is a “huge event that everyone looks forward to,” including people who drive in from other communities to participate.
“If you’re standing on Main Street by the church, anywhere in the vicinity, you smell turkey,” she said.
Celeste called it “the small town tradition that everybody looks forward to.”
“I think Union Grove has a great tie into their communities. Whether it’s a fundraiser for a church or something happened where there was an accident and you’re doing a fundraiser for the family, the really great thing about our community is people really do care,” she said.
Because the dinner has been held for so long, Celeste said the church’s event has fostered family traditions.
Originally from Union Grove, Celeste’s parents started helping at the dinner in 1976, and Celeste and her brothers helped as kids. Now, Celeste’s father and brother make the gravy, and her nephews participate, as well.
She has a four-year-old son, and though she said he’s “not quite ready to help,” she plans to bring him in a year or two.
For families who aren’t members of the church, Celeste said the dinner still encourages traditions: She knows some families who will place an order for about 20 meals so they can sit down and enjoy the food together.
“I think, regardless of if you don’t have the sit-down in the church, that doesn’t mean that the tradition has stopped,” she said. “It just means that these families in the community are being able to slow down, take a little time [to] spend together, and enjoy a good meal together.”
Beyond bringing the Union Grove community together, Just also said the dinner “plays a big role in the church.”
“It helps get us all together and working as a team,” Just said.
Just said interacting with other church members is one aspect of the turkey dinner that he enjoys.
“A lot of times, you don’t get to talk to everybody at the church, and a lot of it is just getting to talk to them and joke around with them,” he said. “I try to keep it (a) very light and cheery kind of atmosphere because we do serve that amount of people in like three to four hours, so we’re moving.”
Celeste shares this experience.
“The very unique thing is, even if people have moved away or don’t come daily or weekly to the service, there’s something about this turkey dinner that just brings everybody together,” she said. “You might not see somebody all year, but you always see them doing their job at the turkey dinner. It’s a commitment that we all have.”
Being involved in the event for 50 years, Just has watched the Turkey Dinner grow.
“Probably 30 years ago, I don’t think we did more than a couple hundred dinners, and now, all of a sudden, we’re close to 800,” he said. “Just the whole growth and the camaraderie that I’ve made with some of the people, that’s what makes me proud of what we’ve accomplished there.”
Though no one has officially taken over his role, Just said a couple volunteers asked to chat about how he organizes the event.
“I think the biggest thing is just at least for the first year, follow along the path that I’ve set up and make the changes as they need to make it for themselves,” said Just, offering advice for the next leader.
Celeste said that nowadays traditions, especially for churches, are failing because not as many people are continuing them; then, once the tradition is gone, it’s hard to bring them back.
“To just keep that going throughout the community, to keep the church in ties with different community members — whether part of our church or just an outreach to different people in the community — I think it’s important to carry on some of these long-standing things just for our own health as a community,” Celeste said.
While Just said he believes someone will volunteer to keep the 70-year tradition going, he’s unsure whether he will be at the next one.
“Whoever is going to take it over, they need to be the one that people are going to, not me,” he said.
Just said that what he’ll miss most about the event is the camaraderie.
“It’s all fun. It really is,” he said. “It’s work, but it really is a lot of fun. ... One of my memories that I’m really going to keep is how everybody came together and we all had a good time.”
The Turkey Dinner is from 4:30-7:30 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 19, at Union Grove Methodist Church, 906 12th Ave. Tickets are $20 and can be purchased from church members, at the drive-thru or by calling 262-878-1248.
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