Thanksgiving 2024: Press Democrat editor’s holiday turkey gets a big boost

I know many of you are feeling anxious and restless today. You can’t sleep. You are irritable, maybe you miss your husband or children.

Believe me, I feel it too, this sense of fear weighs on my soul like a hippopotamus sitting on a chihuahua.

But people, we must stay strong. The day we’ve all been dreading is near, but trust me, we’ll be fine.

We just need all of us to come together as a nation and realize our common bond. We can survive this national nightmare and somehow… survive the end of daylight saving time, which is probably the stupidest idea since the Electoral College.

In the meantime, as a balm for our troubled moods, I’d like to share some good news with you. In fact, this is very good news.

As loyal readers remember, we do Give the editor a Bird turkey drive this year we are again trying to help the less fortunate in our community, not just those who can’t figure it out.

I’m talking about people who have real problems, like not having enough food. Only in the last year Redwood Empire Food Bank serves an average of 61,000 people per month, which is more than 4,000 more than last year. One of the saddest components of this statistic is that among these 61,000 people, an average of 840 new families appear every month.

And while people in our community have been as generous as they have been in previous years, charity does not have time with inflation, although demand continues to grow.

Hunger has long been a favorite cause of mine, and last year I asked the food bank folks if I could do a little holiday turkey drive to help our readers find a way to put more people on the table.

We raised $50,000 in a few weeks. this year we’re doing it againbut we increased our goal by 50% to $75,000, which at 25 bucks per turkey equates to 3,000 birds.

To be honest, I was a bit worried about the goal. Actually, a little more. The informer in the prison shower is nervous, if you must know.

Then on Tuesday I received the aforementioned good news from our friends at Poppy jar via an early morning social media post from their fearless leader, Khalid Acekzai, who wrote that they were giving away 500 turkeys!

Their gift of $12,500 means we have raised just over $30,000.

We still have a long way to go, but I feel much better about our goal. By the way, you can help us achieve this goal by clicking here or going to refb.org/givethebird.

And keep in mind that if – no When – if we reach that goal, my end of the deal is to make $1,000 of my own money from snooping in front of the old Press Democrat Building in Mendocino. In addition, our esteemed publisher, Eric Johnston, will also make a fortune from the money he receives from providing financial advice to CNN’s Anderson Cooper.

As I mentioned in our opening column, people who donate $100 or more will be entered into a raffle to win some incredible prizes, including a private wine tasting for you and a few friends with exes Democratic Press writer Peg Melnyk is to blame. whose name, I am ashamed to pronounce, I cut out in my last column. (In my defense, there were over 900 words in that column, and all the rest were written verbatim.)

Anyway, I’m going to hold off on our second celebrity prize – a beer with a great Bay Area athletic figure – until I’m sure I know the correct spelling of his name.

So I guess that means you’ll have to put up with more of my columns, at least until we reach our goal.

And if that doesn’t raise your anxiety level, nothing will.

John D’Anna is editor-in-chief of The Press Democrat. Contact him at [email protected].