The line stretched out the door of the parish hall at St. Patrick's Catholic Church on Norbeck Road late Tuesday afternoon.

It was a sign of the season and a sign of the times.

This week the county's Holiday Giving Project distributed thousands of Thanksgiving food baskets to low-income residents around the county.

This year, with the lingering effects of the Great Recession hanging over the holidays once again, there are even more mouths to feed.

The Holiday Giving Project helped 9,000 families last year, said the Rev. Rosetta Robinson, the director of congregation and community emergency support for Interfaith Works, a nonprofit contracted by the county to coordinate the program.

This year the network of about 20 churches and nonprofits received requests from 11,000 families in need, Robinson said.

On Tuesday, St. Patrick's, with food donations from a number of sources, including Lockheed Martin in Rockville, IBM in Gaithersburg, Manor Country Club and students at the Thomas Edison High School of Technology in Wheaton, distributed 908 baskets of groceries and turkeys.

"We thank God for St. Patrick's church and other churches and nonprofits that really go out and make it happen," Robinson said.

"We've just been struggling."

Clarence Horton and his wife Viola were just two of the hundreds of thankful recipients in line on Tuesday at St. Patrick's.

The Hortons moved to the Washington metropolitan area to be closer to their college-aged daughter after Hurricane Katrina destroyed their townhouse in New Orleans. They had lived there for 21 years.

"We thought we were settled," Horton said.

Left without a home, the couple, each with medical issues, now lives in Silver Spring.

"We've just been struggling," Clarence Horton said. "We're in debt up to our eyeballs."

Horton said he hadn't planned on having a turkey for Thanksgiving before finding out about the program earlier in the week.

The Holiday Giving Project serves clients from many races, ethnicities, ages and walks of life, including those hovering just above the poverty line, leaving them ineligible for many forms of government assistance.

"There are a lot of people who are borderline," said Kathy Lyons, a member of the Holiday Giving Committee at St. Patrick's.

And many have never turned to social service agencies for help, Robinson said.

"Sometimes for that new group this is a foreign experience for them," she said.

A volunteer-powered assembly line

The experience is one of watching an assembly line powered by volunteers who strive to make the distribution process quick and comfortable for clients.

Lyons and Lisa Mix, a fellow member of the Holiday Giving Committee, have volunteered with the church's program for a dozen years. When they started, the entire operation was "35 baskets out of the back of a station wagon," Mix said.

On Tuesday, Mix helped direct dozens of volunteers as they distributed hundreds of bags and baskets of groceries.

On one half of the parish hall, volunteers — including students from Edison High — loaded shopping carts with the groceries.

St. Patrick's School and religious education students and their parents greeted clients and pushed the carts to cars or pre-arranged rides home.

Other volunteers, at a truck outside, handed out turkeys to clients with vouchers.

"It's good for them to see how they're helping their community," said Kim Palmer of Derwood, who piloted a cart with her daughter Katie, an eighth-grader at St. Patrick's School. Katie was one of more than a dozen students and parishioners who were participating in the project as part of preparation for their confirmation in the Catholic church.

Katie said the project provided a real world opportunity for students to practice what they are learning in religion class about the Ten Commandments.

"The opposite of 'Thou shall not steal' is you should give to the poor in your community," she said.

Putting it all together

Earlier in the day in Wheaton, Edison students loaded a U-Haul truck with 78 boxes of groceries donated by their classmates as part of a project coordinated by the school's Student Government Association.

Jahmas Hamilton, a 17-year-old senior from John F. Kennedy High School in Silver Spring who takes graphic design classes at Edison, watched as David Petrocci, a St. Patrick's parishioner, drove the truck off a loading dock at Edison on the way to St. Patrick's.

"Now seeing it drive away, It's like 'Yeah, it's actually going there,'" Hamilton said.

Hamilton, who is an SGA secretary at Edison, said he looked forward to seeing people's faces as they received their baskets that afternoon at St. Patrick's.

"It makes you realize how lucky you are," he said. "You're thankful your family is able to provide Thanksgiving for you."

If there are 900 families seeking help, there are many others who need it, he said.

"You always want to do more," Hamilton said.

Students organized food collections in their classes, encouraging classmates to donate green beans, peas, apple juice, pie, dinner rolls, potatoes and other foodstuffs.

"It's a good feeling to be able to supply all this food to people who need it," said Laura Gagliardo, a 17-year-old senior at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring who is studying interior design at Edison, where she is an SGA vice president.

Students are documenting their efforts in preparation for competition in the community service division of the SkillsUSA Championships. The competition of career and technical students will be held June 19-24 in Kansas City, MO and Hamilton, Gagliardo and Keyana Stewart, a 16-year-old junior from Albert Einstein High School in Kensington, who is studying cosmetology at Edison, hope to be the team that brings home the championship.

Beside its role in the competition, students said the baskets project gave them a greater appreciation for their school.

"Coming into Edison, I didn't really think about being part of the SGA," Gagliardo said. "But doing this project and being part of SGA has been a really good experience," she said.

"The big thing we really want to show is it is such a group effort," said Amy Johnson, an internship and SkillsUSA coordinator at Edison. "Even our guidance department, administration, staff — they do a basket as well."

Hamilton agreed. "It brings our school together, definitely," he said.

Only 29 shopping days until Christmas

It brings the community as well, as was evident from Tuesday's activity at St. Patrick's, which began at 2:30 p.m. and lasted past 8 p.m., when the last clients were loaded up with their Thanksgiving groceries.

This year, one of the more than 30 years that St. Patrick's has undertaken a holiday giving program, the church donated about 300 baskets.

As part of the countywide effort, individual nonprofits and congregations are responsible for serving specific ZIP codes. St. Patrick's serves 20853 and 20906. Among those communities the need has grown from about 600 two years ago to this year's 900-plus baskets, Lyons said.

Even as Thanksgiving baskets were heading out the door, organizers were zeroing in on the Christmas season, when the Holiday Giving Project aims to provide food and toys to families.

"We're concerned about December now," Robinson said. "There's a gap there and we're thinking about holiday need, toys for children."

Part of bridging that gap means finding ways to stretch resources.

"Today a $10 Target [gift] card is only going to get you so far," she said.

This year, stretching resources may mean stretching budgets of regular donors who find their own families suddenly cash-strapped, Robinson said.

"It's always a good time to thank people who are helping right now because this is a generous community," she said. "And we know that some of our donors are facing their own financial limitations at this time. So we want to thank them for doing what they can."

Families are encouraged to do what they can by donating to or by adopting a family for the holidays through the Holiday Giving Project. Visit the Interfaith Works Web site for more information.