by Lisa Hinton-Valdrighi
KILMARNOCK—The January 23 spaghetti dinner at Kilmarnock United Methodist Church (KUMC) will mark a half century of the annual fundraiser, and the United Methodist Men will celebrate the dinner’s 50th anniversary by reopening the fellowship hall to dining.
Since the 2020 COVID-19 outbreak, the annual dinner has been served to-go only. The men’s group will offer both to-go and dine-in options with this milestone dinner.
“It started out as a sit-down dinner in the church fellowship hall, but during COVID we contemplated whether to cancel it all together or just do take out and so we’ve done that for the past three years. We’ve been asked by a lot of the attendees of our dinner when we’d return to dine-in,” said Eric Nost. “We thought if we were going to go back to dine-in this would be the year to do it.”
Although the dinner has been successful over the past three or four years, ticket sales have been down and the group has deviated from one of its original reasons for the dinner, according to president Jim Bennett.
“The whole premise behind the dinner was threefold, to support the community and offer an affordable meal. Also an important third part of the supper was to create an opportunity to fellowship and….
