This Good Samaritan Can't Host Thanksgiving for Strangers for First Time in 35 Years
Scott Macaulay is one of millions of people who won’t be eating Thanksgiving dinner with family this year. The coronavirus pandemic is to blame for that.
Macaulay is a bit different, however, in that he wouldn’t necessarily have known the family he was eating with.
Macaulay, a vacuum cleaner repairman, is a 59-year-old resident of Melrose, Massachusetts, who’s had an unusual turkey day tradition since 1985.
“I just don’t want people to be stuck at home feeling rotten,” Macaulay told NBC’s “Today.”
He makes sure they don’t.
On a typical Thanksgiving, according to “Today,” Macaulay spends hours hauling chairs, lamps, rugs, candles and portable gas fireplaces into a large open meeting space to give people a comfortable place to relax and “talk for hours.”
“Then he sets tables with beautiful place settings for anywhere from 70 to 100 individuals — elderly people, cancer patients, AA members, low-income people, at-risk teens, recently divorced people, nursing-home residents eager for a change of scenery — and he serves them all mountains of food that he purchases on his own dime and prepares himself.”
That’s a problem in a world where the state of Massachusetts limits gathering sizes at private residences to 10 people.
According to NPR, Macaulay told oral history project StoryCorps that the tradition began 35 years ago when he found himself without a place to spend Thanksgiving dinner after his parents’ divorce.
“I just thought, well, there must be some other people that are in the same boat, and why should they have that rotten feeling? Why should they be stuck home alone?” he said in 2010.
In 1985, he put an ad in the newspaper offering to cook dinner for 12 people who didn’t have a place to go for the holiday.
It went well enough that he now has a second job at a country club to pay for the annual dinner. But for the first time since the Reagan administration, he won’t be having it — and there will be a lot of people, such as Loretta Saint-Louis, who’ll be missing out.
Saint-Louis was new to the area when she attended Macaulay’s 2017 dinner. She facilitated the StoryCorps conversation and talked about her experience.
“I was new to Melrose and I didn’t really know people here,” said Saint-Louis, now 68. “It took a bit of courage for me to just call you.”
Macaulay was thrilled to have Saint-Louis attend, and not just because of his usual hospitality; she was a recently ordained minister, and he needed someone to say grace.
During the oral history interview, Macaulay asked her about her impressions of what he termed “this crazy guy on the other end of the phone.”
“You were so friendly,” she said. “I was blown away, all the care that you put into it. It felt like I was going to a family Thanksgiving event.”
And that’s the horrible thing about this year’s holiday — Macaulay still has plans, but not like before.
“People are still gonna be alone,” he told NBC’s ‘Today.’ “It’s never really been about the food — it was about having a place to go so you wouldn’t be by yourself. But I can’t fix that this year.”
What he’s fixing to do instead is provide those who need to be fed with what what they need for a Thanksgiving feast.
For those who can cook at home, “Today” said, he’s preparing turkey roaster pans filled “with boxes of stuffing, cans of cranberry sauce and an assortment of other fixings. Then he adds gift cards so people can buy turkeys at a local grocery store, and he wraps the whole package up with gift paper to make it look nice.
“For those who don’t have the means to prepare a turkey and side dishes, Macaulay has purchased coupons for individually catered Thanksgiving meals from the deli J. Pace & Son in the nearby town of Saugus, Massachusetts. On Thanksgiving Day, people can don their masks, dash inside the store, present their coupons and walk out with a fresh, hot meal.”
And if you have a tear in your eye from all the selflessness and you’re wondering where to donate — well, load another tear into the chamber.
“I never ask for donations for this. Everybody’s looking for money at this time of year,” Macaulay told ‘Today.’ “I’ll just do as much as I can until there’s no money left.”
But it was never about the food.
“It’s nice to know that you still want to feed us, but it’s the togetherness of it that’s important,” Saint-Louis said, according to NPR.
She’s not the only attendee who would concur.
“What I find always interesting is, despite the great differences, they all have similar things that they’re thankful for,” Macaulay said. “And some of them will make you cry.”
In the world of COVID-19, to have a dinner such as this, Macaulay acknowledges he’s doing the best he can. Most of us are, no matter where we are. It’s a measure of what Macaulay has done, however, that when he asked some of the people receiving his dinners this year to write back what they were thankful for, these were some of the responses, according to “Today”:
- “I’m thankful for every morning when I wake up with my dog.”
- “I’m thankful for all the doctors, nurses, EMTs, firefighters and police who have been working so hard.”
- “I’m thankful for the beauty of the change of leaves. Even in death, they are beautiful.”
- From a 99-year-old woman: “In this COVID-19 time, I’m thankful for life itself!”
“My philosophy is: I can’t fix the country or the world or even the town, but I can brighten my own corner,” Macaulay said on NPR. “It doesn’t matter what any of the differences that we can divide ourselves with — if your neighbor’s house is burning down, you run to help. You run to put the fires out. I’m not going to sit around, talk about it; I’m just going to do something about it. And that’s sort of what the Thanksgiving dinner is all about.
“That would be my hope for America, that everybody would just brighten the corner where they are.”
Amen to that.
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