Hanford Lodge #1543 hosted the Christmas meeting of the United Lodges of the San Joaquin Valley on December 12 in Hanford. President Michael Leoni and Tony Tesoriere cooked a rigatoni & sausage dinner with all the trimmings with help from Jackie Giacomazzi and Louise Tesoriere. Through the generosity of those attending, the United Lodges were able to donate $600 to the St. Brigid Community Outreach Center to give help to those in need at Christmas time. President Michael is also planning to serve his Lodge members polenta & stew at the meeting on January 13. All are welcome to attend with an RSVP to: jackiegiacomazzi@gmail.com. Happy New Year!!

Mangia…Mangia…Mangia.

Saturday, December 18th, the Pick Up Dinner featured ravioli topped with Rick Branch’s famous meat sauce and roast beef with gravy. On a cold Winter’s Day, pasta is high on the list of comfort foods. Kudos to our amazing chefs: John Costa, Glen Rushing and Rick Branch. On the Delivery Team---from the kitchen to the car—were Cristina Bini, Taylor Rojas and Donna Branch. President Pamela Bini collected dinner monies and Rick Silveira handled the sale of Ways & Means tickets. Pick Up Dinners

Santa is now gone, but the CDC tells us that we can now contract COVID A, COVID Delta, COVID Omicron, the flu, and the common cold all at once! We are sooooo blessed!

Last month (December) we had our third get-together at Andiamo’s a family style dinner. Discussion was, again, where we can gather for further meetings. Notre Dame Hall is still not available for our use, with no hint as to when the place will be open.

This month (January): our meeting will be at Luna’s for a 6:00 PM no-host dinner; be sure to let Carol or Isabel

Our Lodge doors did indeed swing open October 12th, not to be thwarted by the pandemic or other nefarious elements. And it was indeed a joyful event, greeting friends, some of whom you hadn’t seen since the pandemic closed our doors. Our Lodge was fortunate, as we only suffered a minimal loss of members during Covid. Understandably some members are still not ready yet to participate in larger events. We look forward to their returning when they feel secure enough! And Joe tells me we have fifteen new members! Welcome to them!

Usually Frank DiSalvo opens the season, and then is the lead entertainer on first Wednesdays of the month, and indeed he was there with his lovely wife Addy, but they had just found out that his brother

GREETINGS FROM REDDING,
December has been a busy month for Shasta Lodge. We started the month with our annual council dinner prepared by Chef James Leedy and his culinary students. What a great group of students. They are preparing for an international culinary competition in April. We then catered two large Christmas parties. We will be hosting the Redding Police Explorers at their annual dinner later in January.

The Crab are here…we have scheduled our annual Crab Feed for February 11th and 12th. We were about 2/3 sold out on the first day