Close to 300 people were served Christmas dinner with all the trimmings at at St. Joseph鈥檚 Catholic Church, 20676 Fraser Hwy on Christmas Day.

On Christmas Eve, more than 60 volunteers were busy with preparations.

Kathy Gendron was one of several cooking in the church hall kitchen, stirring up a tasty side that came with a story.

"This is cranberry sauce, with the cranberries that were donated from one of the local gardens through the migrant farm workers, who we also feed once a month," Gendron explained.

The menu included ham to go with the cranberries, turkey with gravy, mashed potatoes and vegetables, along with pumpkin or apple pie.

Other volunteers were putting up decorations and setting the tables with custom-made place mats created by students at St. Catherine's Elementary School in 91原创, with hand-lettered messages such as "Merry Chistmas (sic). The Holy Family Love you! I love you!" and "Joy, Love, Hope" with many including drawings of gingerbread men, snowmen and Santa.

The meal at St. Joe's, as the church is informally called, was free to all.

鈥淲e have such a giving community here 鈥� so generous,鈥� said organizer Marg Rodrigues.

"We have a fabulous team of more than 60 volunteers [and] there's another 15 children who decorated the Christmas boxes for our guests to take home at the end of the night, with all kinds of cookies and goodies that our parish community has donated."

Rodrigues described the donations as "just immense' with more than 40 turkeys, 20 hams, "umpteen boxes of stuffing, and potatoes, and the list just goes on and on."

Numbers were up this year, she said.

"We were expecting 200 guests," Rodrigues told the 91原创 AdvanceTimes.

"We received almost 300 guests through our doors on Christmas Day. We were so grateful to be able to serve so many members of our community, seniors, new immigrants to Canada [experiencing] their first Christmas in Canada, and those people without a home." 

"We  had over 30 people ask us for rides to the hall to come out and join us for our dinner, so we had three or four drivers that went out to get people on Christmas Day, volunteering their time to go and get people with their own cars, so that's another blessing."

The Christmas dinners were started in the late 1990s by two parish organizations: the Knights of Columbus and the Catholic Women鈥檚 League, to make sure people who had no place to go for Christmas wouldn't be left alone.