Solihull ‘Christmas dinner lady’ cooks 100 lunches for her community as ‘everyone deserves a full tum on Christmas Day’

A mother from Solihull is making more than 100 Christmas dinners for her community this year, as she believes “everybody deserves a full tum on Christmas Day”.

Amanda O’Neill, 42, has been cooking Christmas dinners for people who cannot afford to make their own for four years, and after this year she will have provided more than 220 dinners to people in her community.

When she noticed the cost of living and energy crises having a profound impact on families in her local area, she began putting together Christmas lunches with all the trimmings from her own kitchen in north Solihull, and has become known locally as “the Christmas dinner lady”.

This year, she will be cooking for 108 people, providing them with a delicious, home-cooked festive meal that they would otherwise go without.

Amanda, who is originally from Sunderland, now lives in Solihull with her husband and her two children.

After moving to the area, she became close friends with her neighbour, Elaine, and spoke to her about how she would like to teach her children about the spirit of giving at Christmas, so they would be brought up knowing that the holiday was about more than just getting presents.

Elaine told her about someone she knew who had recently become a single father, and found himself without the money to get his children presents for Christmas. Amanda immediately decided she would help him by rousing her community and donating presents for the family.

However, on December 16 2015, Elaine died suddenly, which Amanda described as “horrendous”, adding that “it was one of the most devastating things I’ve ever been through”.

Elaine, who was in her 60s, had been battling COPD and her body suddenly gave in to the illness just before Christmas.

Despite her grief, Amanda was determined to fulfil her promise to the family, and was thrilled when she discovered her colleagues at the housing association where she worked had come together to gather toys and gifts for the children – so much that they barely fitted in her car.

When she delivered the toys to the single father, she said: “The look on his face, it was like a massive weight had been lifted off his shoulders … It was phenomenal.

“And I decided I’m going to do this every year, for her.”

From then, Amanda’s Christmas mission grew and grew. She started her Christmas dinner plan by giving people everything they needed for a Christmas dinner, gathering food donations and delivering them to those who needed them.

But when the energy crisis hit, she realised many people were in a position of “heat or eat”, and couldn’t afford the gas and electricity needed to spend hours cooking a Christmas dinner.

Then, she began to cook for people from her own family kitchen.

“I’m now locally known as the Christmas dinner lady,” Amanda told PA Real Life.

Amanda co-ordinates, plans and cooks everything, while a handy team of ‘elves’ helps her by delivering the cooked dinners to families in the area.

In 2021, when she began delivering home-cooked meals on Christmas Day, she cooked for 15 people. The next year, it went up to 35.

“Last year we got 65 people, and this year, because it is 10 years since Elaine passed away, I decided to do 100 … but it’s actually 108 now,” Amanda said.

The logistics of Amanda’s mission have “been in the making for years”, but now she has it down to a fine art.

Amanda uses community app Nextdoor to connect with people who need a Christmas dinner in her local area group, and finds around 25% of her recipients this way.

She also uses the likes of Olio – a local sharing app designed to fight waste – to collect food donations, as well as local community Facebook groups.

It is important to Amanda that those in receipt of the Christmas dinners remain anonymous, so when they approach her for help, only Amanda and a select number of people – the delivery volunteers, for example – know who is getting the complimentary meal on Christmas Day.

“We have monetary donations, we have donations of food,” Amanda explained.

“Our local butcher, B&M Meats Birmingham, contacted me and they’re supplying the meat for the dinner… I’ve had people bring chocolates for the children, advent calendars, the vegetables, everything. They’ll say, ‘what do you need?’, and they bring it to me.

“The community effort is phenomenal.”

Amanda cooks all the dinners herself in her family kitchen, and she has volunteers who help her to prepare the vegetables ahead of time as well as those who provide her with slow cookers and bain maries to help with cooking the food.

On Christmas Eve, she will prepare the meat in the slow cookers, make the gravy and package it into individual soup bags, and make the stuffing balls and Yorkshire puddings. Then, on Christmas Day, she is “up at the crack of dawn” – “I’m more excited than the kids!”, she jokes – and after the family have exchanged presents and eaten their cooked breakfast, she starts assembling the meals.

Once everything is ready, she plates it up into large disposable roasting tins, putting everything for the meal together so people can decide what they would like to load up their plates with.

Her children, aged 16 and 13, also help with getting the food ready for delivery, and Amanda said that “it’s been very eye opening for them, and it humbles them every year” as they learn how lucky and privileged they are to not worry about having a meal on the table, especially at Christmas.

“When we get the last dinner out on Christmas Day, I cry,” Amanda revealed.

“I’ll either have a beer or a glass of Elaine’s favourite wine, toast it to the sky, and then I’ll cry, because we’ve done it.”

“I am proud to be part of this community because of how it comes together,” she added, noting that without the generosity of others none of this would be possible.

Amanda feels lucky to be able to provide people in her local community with a delicious Christmas dinner that they might otherwise go without as, she said, “everybody deserves a full tum on Christmas Day”.

She hopes her efforts might inspire other people to organise a similar movement in their local area, to bring their community together and help people in need at Christmas.

Amanda adds that “this isn’t the end, this is just the beginning”, as she notes that she is hoping to partner with local charities to help others in years to come and hopes the initiative gets “bigger and bigger”.

She said it can be as simple as to “cook that little bit extra and find someone out in the community, for people to realise that they’re not alone this Christmas”.

“Reach out to someone and make them feel that, one day a year, you are loved, you are cared for, and you deserve a nice Christmas.”