Pearl Yanick just wants her 1-year-old daughter to remember Thanksgiving the right way.
But with the price of everything from rent to her monthly bills rising, the 27-year-old Jermyn woman simply could not afford to buy the turkey and fixings that her 1- and 3-year-old daughters should see on the table this afternoon.
"My youngest daughter, this is her first memorable year," Ms. Yanick said. "I'm trying to teach her the holidays are about giving."
But, out of work since she lost her job at a Burger King while seven months pregnant with her 3-year-old daughter, there is a real struggle just to get that turkey on the table.
"Having a turkey is not the biggest deal," she said. "But ... when (my daughters) hang out with their friends I want them to know what turkey is."
That is what got her on the bus at 8 a.m.
That's what gave her the patience to spend the better part of an hour en route to the Scranton Cultural Center.
And that is why Ms. Yanick and the hundreds before and behind her stood in a line wrapping from Vine Street onto North Washington Avenue on Wednesday to get inside the Family-to-Family Thanksgiving food basket giveaway.
"It's a godsend," said Mike Creegan, a 57-year-old Scranton man with plans to cook the holiday meal for two of his children he'll be sharing the table with this afternoon.
Mr. Creegan, a truck driver out of work since April, was the next body due in the door at the cultural center as the giveaway got under way shortly after 9 a.m.
And it was the people in line with him, people like Ms. Yanick, who the organizer of the 26th annual giveaway, Mary Lou Burne, referred to when she addressed the hundreds of volunteers gathered inside and spoke about "people who you might not see everyday."
"They have their families. They have a place to live. They just need the food," she said.
And on Wednesday morning, the Scranton Cultural Center was the place to fill that need.
Throughout the center's ballroom, dozens of tables heaped with fruit, bread, all the "bounty that we all will share with all our relatives," as Mrs. Burne described it, awaited them.
And standing around those tables were those volunteers, like sentinels of charity waiting at the ready, from middle school students to everyday citizens who came out to be "dream makers."
"You are the dream makers who make it possible," said Sister Adrian Barrett, I.H.M., in an address to the volunteers before the giveaway began. "We could have all the turkey in the world but look at me - I can't hand out them all."
Looking on the scene spread out before him as the room grew in anticipation of giving, Diocese of Scranton Bishop Joseph Bambera recalled a line of scripture, something Jesus said: "Whatever you do to the least of my brothers and sisters, you do to me."
"We're not just seeing somebody that we see maybe once a year or have never seen before," the bishop said of the masses in line just outside. "God is in them."
In keeping with the spirit of the annual giveaway, Mrs. Burne pointed out that most of the donations sent in to finance the program were for $25, an amount that to her seemed indicative of "one family helping another."
And there were just enough of those families to help all the others, as Family-to-Family reached its $85,000 fundraising goal for the program on Wednesday morning, Mrs. Burne said to the volunteers.
"What we're doing today is bigger than anyone of us," Rabbi Joe Mendelsohn pointed out as he addressed the volunteers. "But without every one of us it couldn't get done."
Contact the writer: domalley@timesshamrock.com, @domalleytt on Twitter