COUNTYWIDE : Christmas Turkeys Bring Students Joy

Santa Ana Police Officer Jeff Owens knew that the hundreds of boxes of food that he spent Sunday morning packaging were going to a good cause: the students at Pio Pico Elementary School.

For the past three years, Owens, a seven-year member of the force, has taken a special interest in the students of the school, which is in one of Santa Ana’s poorest neighborhoods.

“I know a lot of these kids and a lot of their families,” Owens said. “Doing something like this really re-instills what the spirit of Christmas is all about.”

Owens was among the members of the Royal Vikings of Orange County who spent Sunday morning at the parking lot of The Ritz restaurant in Newport Beach, packing 800 frozen turkeys with all of the trimmings into boxes for needy families.

“The economy being what it is, there is definitely more of a need this year,” said Todd Chisam, chief officer of the Laguna Beach-based philanthropic group. “We packed more boxes than we ever have before and still we couldn’t take care of all the requests that we had.”

The group, made up of 140 business people in Orange County, has distributed meals to needy families for more than a decade.

This year, more than a dozen local charities will be distributing the meals. They include: Share Our Selves in Costa Mesa; the Orange County Rescue Mission; the Episcopal Service Alliance in San Clemente; the YWCA in Santa Ana and La Amistad de Jose, a clinic run by St. Joseph Hospital.

The boxes, which have enough food to provide a holiday dinner for up to six people, were also given to some of the families who lost their homes in the recent Laguna Beach fire, Chisam said.

More than 100 boxes were also given to the Santa Ana Civic Center Housing Barrio Assn., which develops low-income housing for the poor.

“All of these families are hard-working people who happen to be low-wage earners,” said Helen Brown, president of the association. “To be able to provide dinner for 100 of these families is incredible for us.”

At Pio Pico Elementary School, where 98% of the students live in poverty, the mood was joyous Sunday afternoon when families arrived at the school to pick up their meals, Principal Judy Magsaysay said.

“It means the difference between having a holiday dinner and not having one,” Magsaysay said of the food boxes. “It’s a special treat.”