It was a holiday mission that almost never happened.

In the weeks leading up to Christmas, local developer Tony Zieter had wanted to donate 100 turkey dinners to struggling families in the Plymouth area, where he's planning on building two separate development projects. Yet when Zieter approached the city of Plymouth for help in distributing the aid, he was told by officials they weren't in a position to get involved. However, Zieter soon found a number of other would-be Santas in the Ione Band of Miwoks, the Plymouth Fire Department and a pool of community volunteers.

The tenuous turkey situation came to a head at the Dec. 11 Plymouth City Council meeting, where Zieter's representative, Stephanie McNair, asked the city council to publicly explain why they weren't taking the developer up on his offer to deliver the donated turkeys to Plymouth families. City Manager Dixon Flynn attempted to explain.

"It's not that we don't want to help, but we're just not in the business of giving out turkeys," he told McNair and those present. "We don't have some kind of list that would inform us which families need them and which families don't. We're directing you to the Interfaith Food Bank, because they're in a better position to handle this donation than we are."

McNair countered that the food bank is for residents of the entire county, and her employer was trying to donate to needy families in and around Plymouth.

"Mr. Zieter wants this help to be specifically for Plymouth," she told the gathering. "I don't understand why the council won't partner with us to get these turkeys to residents right here."

When Flynn again asserted that the city staff had no knowledge of which families in town were struggling and needed the help, community volunteer Maria Nunez stepped in.

"Our local firefighters know which families are struggling," she told the council as she approached the podium. "They have several efforts of their own to help families and they know which homes to give these dinners to."

With Nunez on board to coordinate, Zieter's staff contacted the Ione Band of Miwok Indians to see if it would assist in putting the dinners together and handing them out. The tribe's vice chairman, Gil Jamerson, was enthusiastic about the idea.

"We had the developer bring the turkeys to our office in Plymouth and my staff and I assembled the baskets," Jamerson recalled. "When they were finished, Rich Martin from the fire department, Maria Nunez, myself and some other volunteers went out into the community and handed them over to all of the households who needed them."

Nunez said that members of the fire department gave out 30 of the dinners on their own, and she and her volunteers gave out the other 70.

"It was an awesome day," she declared. "There were tears in the eyes of a lot of people. Some of the families had husbands and fathers who had recently lost their jobs and didn't even know how they were going to afford a Christmas dinner."

For Nunez, the effort was something positive to dwell on amidst all of the dark and "depressing" news on the local front.

"To see everyone come together and make this happen was a beautiful thing," she said. "This was a search to count blessings and think about hope."