Come Christmas day, people will sit down to enjoy a meal with family but for the men and women in firehouses and police stations around North Texas, food can be tough to find. That’s why 10 years ago, “feed-a-hero” was born — a volunteer-led effort to deliver Christmas meals, but NBC 5’s Allie Spillyards shows us, this year — for the first time in a decade — that day of service won’t happen.
For the last 10 years, Christmas has looked a bit like a conveyor belt for Jim Searles.
After delivering a holiday meal to a Denton Firehouse with his kids in 2013, Searles has spearheaded Feed-a-Hero.
Every Christmas Eve, 400 volunteers gather to pack and assemble holiday plates filled with brisket, sides and rolls, before packing and delivering them to 7,000 first responders.
It’s an effort that’s grown exponentially throughout the last decade.
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But this Christmas, Searles said the holiday is simpler.
"It was a tough one because it's been a tough year,” said Jim Jim Searles.
Last month, Searles released a video to the volunteers he lovingly refers to as the Feed-a-Hero Nation.
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In it, he told them that after battling pneumonia for the better part of the year, he was following his doctor's advice to cancel Feed-a-Hero Christmas.
"She was like, ‘There's no way. Your heart and soul goes into this, you can't go out and work 18 hours a day between your regular job and Feed-a-Hero and pull this off. It literally will put you back into a troublesome spot with your health’," he said.
Searles calls the decision to buck tradition a painful one.
He said he feels that he’s not only letting down thousands of first responders but also the families who’ve made this day of service a tradition.
For those who reach out, he’s encouraging them to continue the work on their own.
"Nothing's going to stop you from going down to your fire station, your community's police station and saying we're just going to bless this one station or this city's station and still deliver a Christmas meal,” said Searles.
Because while the man behind the mission sits this one out, Feed-a-Hero lives on.
Today, Searles said many of the departments they've served now provide meals for their heroes.
His group will also continue to hold fundraisers and show year-round support for first responders that it's taken on over the last few years.
"The fact that we manage to serve 7,000 first responders is incredible. It's incredible that the community came together and made that happen,” he said.
For the last several years, Rudy’s Bar-B-Que has provided food for the Christmas Day deliveries.
Searles said this year, the restaurants will extend a discount to volunteers who purchase meals to drop off to fire stations and police departments on their own.
