Sedalia Sacred Heart High School National Honor Society prepares hundreds of Christmas Eve dinners
While many of their classmates were asleep enjoying the first day of winter break, members of Sacred Heart High School’s National Honor Society were up early on a mission to provide healthy holiday meals.
Faculty advisor Brianna Libby had the NHS students show up at 7 a.m. Thursday, Dec. 21 to begin cooking hundreds of Christmas Eve dinners for delivery on Saturday, Dec. 23.
“Right now, they are making meals for the Christmas Eve dinner, which is going to be held on Dec. 23,” Libby said. “Since Christmas Eve is on a Sunday this year, to keep Sunday the Sabbath for Catholics, they are delivering about 750 meals. Our goal was 1,000, so we’re still hoping to call a few more places, like fire stations, police stations, maybe a little bit outside of Sedalia.”
The students who weren’t cooking were busy planning routes for Saturday’s drivers to follow, with some deliveries going to Knob Noster and even as far as Warrensburg.
“The kids out here are now putting together addresses for our delivery drivers,” Libby explained. “I think right now 28 routes and I think we’ll probably have about 40 routes going out by Saturday.”
The menu for Sacred Heart’s dinner is traditional, and the food is prepared with loving care.
“The meal is going to be honey-baked ham,” Libby said. “It’s going to be mashed potatoes and gravy, Hawaiian rolls, and pie. All the students are bringing three pies each to hopefully feed 1,000 people.”
And the students performed as a team, though much of their kitchen training was on the fly, with just a few helpful pointers from adults.
“It’s actually been really good,” Libby said. “We’ve only had one slight injury but it’s OK. She’s been delegated to another job, and we could still use her. We haven’t had any burning episodes. They are seasoning, making sure everything tastes good and really working well together.”
Sophomore Bailee Vogel was taking a turn mixing a large vat of potatoes, a process that requires plenty of arm strength.
“Right now, we are boiling and mixing all the potatoes,” Vogel said. “It’s been entertaining. We’re mixing three gallons of water with each package of mashed potatoes.”
Like most people, Vogel has some experience helping with holiday meals, just not on such a grand scale.
“It makes it fun and challenging, which I enjoy,” Vogel said. “I really enjoy it, I really like giving to the community and getting to spend time with my friends. It’s a good thing for us to do as a community to help other people in need. It’s really a great way to show Jesus through all of this.”
Sophomore Delaney Grose offered a taste of the mashed potatoes, which were delicious, if a tad salty.
“It’s because we don’t really have a measuring system that well,” Grose admitted. “We’re just going off taste and what tastes good.”
Not to mention, there are a lot of cooks in one small kitchen, adding to the controlled chaos.
“Well, it’s really hard,” Grose said, “because you don’t have a lot of room to work and we’re running out of space for the potatoes, but it feels nice. We’re doing it for a good reason.”
“We got up and we came in at 7 to start cooking,” Ebrinn Cahill said. “Rough, tired, but we were all happy. We have a goal, and the goal is to help people get as many meals as we can. I know I’m helping people who are in need, it makes you think of people who might not have a family or have the best situation going on, and you’re just helping them, even if just in a small way. It’s really fun. It would have been our first day off, but now we get to have one more day with friends before Christmas.”
Chris Howell is a reporter for the Sedalia Democrat newspaper (sedaliademocrat.com), which published a version of this article on Dec. 21, 2023, and granted permission for this version to be published here.
