Westminster’s Christmas Dinners: A Community Event
by Amanda Weber, Director of Worship and the Arts
For decades, Westminster has gathered for a special holiday feast the first weekend of December. From the first Christmas Dinner, which featured a reading of A Cup of Christmas Tea, to last year’s Amahl and the Night Visitors presented by the James Sewell Ballet, this tradition remains an important part of the Advent season at Westminster. This is an “all hands on deck” event, which is a large part of what makes it so special. Westminster members are actors, singers, servers, and more as we all come together to celebrate.
This year the dinners will be Friday, December 1, and Saturday, December 2, and will feature a staged reading of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, led by former Artist-in-Residence Sam Bardwell and with a cast of 15 Westminster members. Evening performances will be accompanied by a sumptuous meal by Breaking Bread Catering, an enterprise of Appetite for Change, which is an organization supported in part by Westminster. Breaking Bread’s delicious food celebrates the roots and honors the legacy of Black Americans while also helping to build health, wealth, and social change in North Minneapolis.
Evening performances are on Friday, December 1, and Saturday, December 2, and will feature a pre-dinner social time with cash bar and musical entertainment starting at 5:45pm, and dinner seating will begin at 6:30pm. Tickets for dinner and the performance are $50 per adult and $25 per youth.
There will be a matinee performance on Saturday, December 2, at 1pm with Christmas cookies and hot cocoa. Tickets for the matinee performance are $25 per adult and $10 per youth.
