This year, Nancy Hibshman will be putting her feet up and eating hamburgers and hot dogs.

James King and his wife are planning to sit down to a shrimp dinner on Thanksgiving.

And Steve Gainer and his family will be ordering Chinese takeout.

When you are helping to prepare hundreds and even thousands of Thanksgiving dinners, complete with the sweet potatoes, pumpkin pies, stuffing, gravy and the big bird, somehow coming home to a traditional Thanksgiving dinner with all the fixings just doesn't cut it.

Hibshman, 55, of Bowmansville, organizes the free Thanksgiving dinner at St. Stephen United Church of Christ, 249 E. Main St., New Holland.

The church feeds about 250 people every year, though she's never quite sure how many people will show up. (She counts on the "loaves and fishes thing" to get everyone fed and every year, somehow, they always are.)

"I know hamburgers and hot dogs are non-traditional, but they're simple and easy," says Hibshman with a laugh.

King, 39, of Willow Street, and originally from Mississippi, is the food services director at Lancaster General Hospital. Getting thousands of meals prepared day in and day out is what he does all the time, but those turkeys seem to be everywhere in the few days before Thanksgiving.

"I do get tired of turkey," he says with a laugh.

Gainer, 46, of East Lampeter Township, is the head chef at Miller's Smorgasbord, 2811 Lincoln Highway East, Ronks, where close to 2,000 people will eat their Thanksgiving meal.

He and his family won't, though.

"We're doing Chinese this year because we couldn't get a reservation for all 12 of us," Gainer says, chuckling.

He'll start work at 6 a.m. By the time the restaurant closes, the business will have served about 300 pounds of turkey thighs and 450 pounds of turkey breasts.

And you thought your 30-pound bird was a lot of turkey.

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"I'm an organizer. Dozens of other people do the real work," insists Hibshman, who started the free Thanksgiving meal back in 1995 along with another member of the St. Stephen U.C.C. congregation.

"It was just a casual conversation," Hibshman recalls. "Someone said they were going to go help at the Water Street Rescue Mission, and we wondered, why can't we do something here?"

And so the tradition began. The church was open to anyone for any reason. Reservations were not required.

"That first year we did about 65 meals, and it grew from there. After 14 years, the congregation really does everything. All the donations come in, we have enough food, money, paper products," she says. "Whatever we need, God provides. Someone even picks up all the laundry and cleans it."

Volunteers are not hard to find.

"People come to the meal for many reasons, but people also volunteer for many reasons," Hibshman says, remembering in particular a man nobody knew who came to help several years ago.

"At the end of the day he told me, 'You don't know what this means to me.' We didn't know, but his wife had been killed, and he was facing Thanksgiving alone.

"It doesn't matter why they come, they come," says Hibshman, a former teacher at Garden Spot Middle School who now runs a quilt shop, Piece by Piece, in Ephrata. "It's so rewarding to see it all come together. People are jovial, they're smiling. It is truly amazing."

But doesn't she miss having her own holiday meal with her husband Barry, and their family?

"My (three) kids are grown and when they got married, they had to split their time. My holiday is any time my family is around the table. That's when we celebrate. Not Dec. 25 or Thanksgiving Day or Easter Sunday; it's any time we are together."

•••

Lancaster General Hospital has to feed a lot of people every day of the year.

But King and his staff want Thanksgiving dinner to be special.

"Nobody wants to be in the hospital on a holiday," King says. "Employees do try to go the extra mile. There are a lot more visitors. Families don't want their loved ones to be forgotten on that day."

Often, visitors will eat their meal with patients.

"So we try to make the meals special for everyone," King says. "It's all homemade. We make good food here."

And lots of it. There are generally around 400 meals for patients plus food for all the visitors and employees who will be eating their Thanksgiving meal at the hospital.

With all the different shifts at the hospital, meals are served from 2 to 4 Thursday morning, and then from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. through the rest of the day.

Turkey is a regular item on the hospital menu year round because it's a healthy food. But other less healthy things pop up on the traditional Thanksgiving menu, like gravy and stuffing and pies.

"Depending on dietary restrictions, we're a little more lenient on Thanksgiving," King says. "And we recognize that not everybody is going to eat turkey. We've got alternatives, like vegetable lasagna."

That holds true for King himself. He and his wife Pam will be eating a shrimp dinner Thursday.

"It's become our own tradition," he says. "But we get plenty of turkey when we go to other people's houses."

•••

For Gainer, Thanksgiving is about lots of numbers.

"Every year I run a tracking sheet with the projected and the actual numbers so I can figure out the next year," he says.

And those numbers are mind boggling.

"We've got 300 pounds of bread stuffing, 300 pounds of turkey thighs, 450 pounds of boneless white meat turkey, about 400 pounds of candied sweet potatoes, 100 pounds of succotash, 400 to 500 pounds of mashed potatoes, 35 to 40 gallons of gravy." (Of all the food he prepares, Gainer is proudest of his gravy, which he says everyone oohs and aahs over.)

And those remarkable quantities don't even include the beef and ham you can choose for your Thanksgiving dinner at Miller's Smorgasbord.

Also, don't forget the pies, which are made in the restaurant bakeshop. With the pumpkin and the apple and the shoofly and the mincemeat and the chocolate pecan and the coconut, we're talking well over 150 pies.

 "You're overwhelmed with choices here," Gainer says,

Gainer starts thinking about Thanksgiving in October.

"I want to get all my ducks in a row, get everything ordered. The last thing you want to find out is that you can't get your sweet potatoes," he says.

The restaurant buys pre-peeled potatoes.

"Peeling alone would be a fulltime job," Gainer says.

The kitchen runs like an assembly line, and Gainer notes if equipment breaks down, Miller's has its own maintenance team which can swoop in and fix everything quickly.

"Our biggest fear is if the dishwasher breaks down," Gainer says.

More numbers: The average diner uses three dinner plates, two soup bowls and two saucers, two salad dishes, three dessert plates, three drink glasses and one coffee cup and saucer. Now multiply that by 2,000. Like we said, mind boggling.

Gainer has been a professional cook all his adult life, including five years at Miller's and five years at its sister restaurant, Plain and Fancy. He can't remember not working on Thanksgiving.

"I love Thanksgiving," he says. "We've got a good crew here, and we're a seamless kitchen. It's like a walk in the park."

But don't think there is any rest for the weary.

The following day is Black Friday. The outlets are just down the road.

"That's another busy day," Gainer says with a laugh.

Maybe he and his wife, Sally, will be eating Chinese leftovers that day.


Staff writer Jane Holahan can be reached at jholahan@LNPnews.com or 481-6016.