The sixth annual free Thanksgiving dinner will be Thanksgiving Day (Thursday Nov. 26) from 11:30 a.m.-1:30 p.m. at S&G Grocery at Stephens Crossroads.
This year’s dinner will be take-out only due to Covid-19. However, Ulises and Sabrina Gonzalez and their four daughters (who own the store) hope that they will have a crowd.
When they first started the Thanksgiving tradition, they served 80 meals — last year that number was up to 179, which is huge considering S&G is the only place for groceries, gas, hardware, a laundromat and “just about anything store” along that stretch of Bells Highway at Stephens Crossroads.
The dinner attracts not only the rural residents around the crossroads, but people from Walterboro and other local communities. Last year they also distributed 30-40 leftover plates to people walking the streets in Charleston.
The menu is traditional Thanksgiving: fried and baked turkey, ham, red and white rice, green beans, macaroni and cheese, candied yams, homemade stuffing with gravy, banana pudding and more.
“We’ll start prepping the night before, then come in Thanksgiving morning and cook,” Gonzalez said. “There’s a lot of preparation: cutting up potatoes, seasoning meats and such. But we get up early so we can do this and spend a little bit of family time together.” (He and his wife, who have been married 20 years, have four daughters: 20, 17, 16 and 7. In fact, the store’s name, S&G, stands for Sabrina and Girls.)
Gonzalez grew up two blocks from downtown Boston, Mass. After 24 years with Ford Motor Credit, he transferred to Ford Corporation in Charleston, his wife’s hometown, in 1999.
So how did a big city boy end up running a grocery store in remote Colleton County?