As the annual Community Christmas Dinner approaches, it’s hard not to think of Ginger Shoji, the local dynamo who founded the feast (with Tuulikki Tennant and Harvey Barker, the United Church minister) and spearheaded it for 20 years before she stepped down nine years ago.
“Ginger literally had to be replaced by half a dozen people,” said Michelle Cole, who is part of the team now running the dinner. “But she still insists on making the cranberry sauce each year.”
The first Community Christmas Dinner was held in the United Church. The idea was to have a feast that could be shared by people who were alone at Christmas, Ginger said, remembering her first Christmas in Vancouver after she moved there from Ontario. “I really didn’t know anybody. I had a few friends but they were going home for Christmas,” something Ginger couldn’t afford to do. So the Revelstoke dinner was “for anyone who was alone on Christmas Day,” no matter what their financial circumstances.
The first dinner had three large turkeys that were shared by 27 people, “including the volunteers,” Ginger said. The meal has grown a lot since then. Held at the United Church, Scotty’s Pancake House (where they also fed people off the highway, Tuulikki said), Frisby Ridge, the Frontier Restaurant and back to the United Church, the dinner served around 300 meals last year, according to Michelle.
Ginger was born in Germany in 1950. Her father was a Hungarian chemical engineer and her mother was a German figure skater. The family immigrated to Kirkland Lake, Ontario before Ginger was a year old. Her father worked as a miner while he learned English. “My dad really loved people – and dogs,” Ginger said. “He always had friends from work from other cultures. He would invite them over. He said you can learn a lot from people from other cultures.”
Her father’s attitude transferred to Ginger. The family moved from Kirkland Lake to Yellowknife, NWT, to Virginiatown and Port Colborne in Ontario where her dad eventually worked as a research scientist, but Ginger described the experience of moving as “good.” “I learned how to make friends. You didn’t wait for other people to come you.”
It was the late 1960s and Ginger saw her options as limited in Port Cobourn. “I could either be a secretary, a nurse or I could work at Woolworths,” she said. In 1970, when she was 20, Ginger joined a friend who was driving to B.C. Her friend drove on to Victoria and dropped her off in Vancouver. She was utterly alone, but she had the social skills to make connections.
Ginger found a place in Kitsilano and a job in a clothing store on upper Granville Street. Revelstoke-born Elmer Shoji owned a cycle store nearby. One day Ginger decided to hitchhike to work and Elmer recognized her as he drove by. He offered her a ride and said he would drive her to work and home after that if she wanted. “He had the nicest smile I ever saw,” she said.
Ginger and Elmer dated for eight years before they married. “I married my best friend,” she said.
The couple had a son, Jay, and wanted a daughter so they applied to adopt a girl from Korea. The adoption agency “let us know they had a girl and she had a brother. I came from a family of four kids and Elmer had a family of six. You just don’t separate siblings,” she said. That’s how Todd and Leanne joined the family.
When the children were still young, Elmer was working very long hours in the insurance business and Ginger and the children didn’t see him much. That situation needed to change. Elmer and Ginger decided to move to Revelstoke where he still had family. They have never looked back.
Personal and family experiences of cancer have driven a number of Ginger’s ambitious activities in Revelstoke. In 2004, after surviving breast cancer, she founded a support group for women living with cancer. The group meets monthly and provides funds for women who need help with appointments.
In 2005, Ginger and Elmer founded the Lake Revelstoke Dragon Boat Society, a sport that was becoming popular among breast cancer survivors – although participation is not limited to survivors of cancer.
Other than the Christmas dinner, Ginger, who has never gotten her driver’s licence, is probably best known for walking long distances around Revelstoke.
“I had lost my sister-in-law to cancer. I had walked back and forth to the hospital to see her and, when she died, I decided to focus on making myself healthy. I was 15 years in remission and realized I had never really celebrated the fact that I was still alive. I weighed about 165 pounds. So I started walking every day. It was slow at first because all my joints and everything hurt. I was overweight.” But it became easier and more enjoyable, like a “walking meditation,” she said.
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