When Edgecomb’s Tisa Bolduc was raising her children, she noticed that their holiday excitement had started to center on picking out what they wanted in the Sear’s catalog.

“My kids got greedy,” she said.

Living in Salt Lake City, Utah, at the time, she took them to volunteer at a local soup kitchen for Thanksgiving. She hoped it would help them see that the holiday season is about giving.

It worked. She found them one day gathering up goods at home to donate to those in need.

The family has kept its spirit of giving. Bolduc and son Jacob Walmer of Whitefield, a Wiscasset High School graduate and a veteran, spent Thanksgiving, Nov. 26, volunteering at a six-hour, free Thanksgiving dinner at Wiscasset Community Center.

“It’s just really near and dear to my heart,” Tisa Bolduc said about the event that she, husband Brian Bolduc and Valerie and Bob MacDonald of Wiscasset started in 2014. Last year and this year, several volunteers joined them, the community center donated the use of the senior center, and organizers wished more people had taken them up on the offer of the traditional turkey meal.

Volunteers filled plates with turkey and vegetables just inside the kitchen window; in open areas, attendees could get biscuits, pickles, punch and their pick of desserts.

“There’s a very good meal in there,” one woman said after exiting the community center. The vegetables were very good, she said.

Last year’s turnout got a big boost when utility crews, working to restore power in the area, showed up to eat; aside from them, however, attendance was less than Bob MacDonald had hoped, and it was on the light side again this year, he said.

But the event will continue in 2016, with a new plan to raise attendance by offering rides to it, MacDonald said. He was wearing drumstick antennae on his head.

The holiday season seemed to come quickly this year, he said. He hadn’t been feeling very festive — that was, until he put up decorations at the center and helped get the Thanksgiving meal ready. “Now I can feel it. It’s Christmastime.”