For decades, the Auburn Food Bank has made annual Thanksgiving and Christmas traditions out of distributing holiday boxes of food to local families in need.

During the Christmas distribution on Dec. 23, more than 2,000 people — or 600 to 700 families — received food in the Fellowship Hall at Holy Family Catholic Church, which for many years has allowed the food bank to use its faciities to accommodate the need.

And the need is great, said Debbie Christian, executive director of the Auburn Food Bank, in her office at the agency’s new home on Auburn Way North.

“It’s a big day,” Christian said of the distribution.

Christian called the distribution “a community event” in the best sense, and not only for the people whom it helps, but also for the volunteers, of whom an estimated 160 pitched in to lend their many hands to the vital task.

Families register for the event so the food bank knows how many people are coming, what to buy and how much to buy. That is no easy task when the economy is as tight as it is right now

“Always at the holidays,” Christian continued, “there’s a lot of anxiety going around and people asking themselves: am I going to have enough food to make it for the families that are coming? Am I going to have to eat this all by myself because nobody’s coming? And then with the prices this year and with everything going up, it’s hard for familiies to even think about making their own purchases.”

The hardest part for clients, Christian said, is having to stand in line and wait for the doors to open so they can enter and choose the food they would like from a variety of options, including staples like chicken, ham, turkey, gravy mix, jello, green beans, bread, rolls and more.

This year for the first time, Christian said, the food bank “ventured out,” and for Muslim families bought Halal meat like goat, lamb and even chicken. For the many Latinos who come through, the busy bees made sure there was special flour for them on the food line, or different items that may fit their diet better than they fit standard American fare.

“I try very hard to ensure that we have enough food so that all the boxes would look the same if we had to build them ourselves,” Christian said. “Because I don’t want anybody to worry about coming in at noon and not getting the things they would’ve gotten if they’d been there at 9 a.m. We tend to overbuy, so we have enough for everyone who comes through the door. We do not like telling anybody ‘You don’t have to come today, you can come tomorrow,’ when we’ll be there cleaning up. We’d rather everybody came through the line.”

Coming into this Christmas season, Christian said, the food bank was doing better this year than it’s done in the last three years, which were extremely difficult.

“Having this year start looking like what we used to call ‘normal’ has been a blessing to us to be able to provide. Last year, it was really hard to make ends meet and make sure we had enough food for everybody. This year it was like, oh, I can go buy that, I can spend a little extra here because we do have money coming in. The blessing of this had us feeling like we didn’t have to panic,” she said.

Debbie Christian, executive director of the Auburn Food Bank, 2804 Auburn Way N. Photo by Robert Whale/Auburn Reporter