In a School Kitchen on Christmas Morning, a Different Kind of Lesson

On Christmas morning, while most of Albuquerque was still quiet, the lights were already on inside a state-of-the-art kitchen at MAS Charter School’s Old Coors campus. 

Stainless steel counters gleamed under fluorescent panels. The air carried the smell of warming tortillas and eggs, along with the steady rhythm of a working kitchen. Gloved hands moved in practiced lines, foil squares were stacked like sheets of silver paper, and volunteers called out counts as burritos piled higher in insulated bins.

Outside, the holiday arrived with its familiar messages about comfort and plenty. Inside, the day was about something else: speed, coordination, and care for people spending Christmas without a home. 

The work was part of an annual effort led by ABQ Give Grub, a mutual aid collective of local artists and musicians that has served hundreds of people on Christmas Day for the past eight years. This time, their cooking apparatus had a new backbone: a partnership with MAS Charter School and its longtime kitchen vendor, Canteen of Central New Mexico. It became a cooking crew that opened a school kitchen built for students and, for one morning, turned it into a production line for a community in need.

A Mutual Aid Tradition, Built by Artists and Musicians

ABQ Give Grub started out as the kind of Albuquerque project that grew from grassroots relationships. Artists and musicians who know the city’s venues and neighborhoods also know the people who fall through the cracks, especially in winter. Over time, the group developed an annual rhythm: musical events, fundraising, and donations that culminate in Christmas Day distribution for unhoused community members.

The Christmas Day effort was focused on more than the food. By showing up year after year, with a level of consistency that people living on the edge rarely get from systems meant to serve them, the volunteers showed people that they are seen and that they matter. In a television interview about the Christmas morning effort, organizer Xazziel Martinez described a shift this year from purely grassroots improvisation to asking directly for support.

“This is the first year I sent an email for this,” Martinez said. “Every year has just been grassroots, just out of pocket.”

That email, and the response it received, helped create the conditions for what happened at MAS’ Old Coors kitchen on Dec. 25.

The Ask That Made the Kitchen Possible

In the weeks leading up to Christmas, ABQ Give Grub reached out to a company that works in coordination with MAS Charter School to manage its kitchens: Canteen of Central New Mexico. The message was both practical and ambitious. ABQ Give Grub was organizing a three-part Community Unity Winter Fundraiser Series running from the holiday season through Valentine’s Day, with concerts spanning funk and R&B, hip-hop and metal, and traditional community music. The idea was to raise funds and gather donations for local harm-reduction and social-service programs.

But the email also included a logistical need that shapes whether community care can actually happen at scale: space.

“Venues with large kitchens to host prep & cooking days prior to food distribution on 12/25 & 2/14,” the message read. “Please let us know what you might be able to help with!”

For ABQ Give Grub, this was the difference between feeding a few dozen and feeding hundreds. Kitchens like MAS’ that can handle large-batch, scratch cooking come with barriers. They are expensive, regulated, and rarely available on the days when volunteer groups need them most.

Canteen of Central New Mexico responded by partnering with MAS Charter School to make the Old Coors campus kitchen available on Christmas morning.

Christmas Morning at MAS: From Classroom Resource to Community Infrastructure

What happened next was the kind of behind-the-scenes collaboration that rarely makes a headline. Canteen team members volunteered on site, helping run the kitchen and supporting ABQ Give Grub’s volunteer crew as they cooked breakfast burritos from scratch using ingredients donated by Rt 66 Diner. The objective was to produce a large number of burritos, with organizers describing a count that reached into the hundreds and, in internal reporting, as many as 800.

In the local news story covering the cooking effort, the television station described volunteers cooking, wrapping, and stacking breakfast burritos to distribute in Albuquerque’s International District — a diverse neighborhood in southeast Albuquerque, centered along Central Avenue (historic Route 66), that is known for its international restaurants and markets, the New Mexico State Fairgrounds, and the city’s “Little Saigon” Vietnamese enclave. The visuals captured the scale and timing of the morning, even as it left out an important part of the story: the kitchen itself and the partnership that made the donated space possible.

That omission is common in community work. The visible act is the handoff on the street, the exchange of food and a smile, the moment of contact that breaks through isolation. The infrastructure that makes those moments possible often stays in the background: the keys, the safety protocols, the staff that knows how to run a commercial kitchen, the facility designed for teaching that becomes, for a morning, a community lifeline.

For MAS Charter School, the Christmas Day use of its kitchen offered a different view of what school resources can be when they are treated as part of a neighborhood’s shared capacity and not just a campus asset.

More Than Food: Dignity, Connection, and a City’s Self-Image

When volunteers hit the streets after the cooking ended, the distribution carried a message that went beyond nutrition. One organizer, Jess Bess, described the motivation in plain terms: “It’s just because people have big hearts and they want to serve our community, and they love Albuquerque.”

Mark Brown, one of the volunteer cooks, framed it as something passed down, and something aimed forward. “It’s a bit of a passion project,” he said. “This is something that my mom used to do, too.” Then he added a civic ambition that speaks to what many families quietly hope for, especially those raising children in the city: “Make it better for the kids. I want to have kids so, you know, I want them to be able to grow up where I did, in a safe manner.”

That line lands differently when you think about a charter school opening its start-of-the-art kitchen doors on Christmas morning. Schools are places where families invest their trust. They are places that represent the future, in the literal sense of children learning, and in the symbolic sense of what a charter school founder intends to build. When a school’s facilities support a Christmas Day distribution for unhoused neighbors, it makes a statement about belonging that community care is not separate from education, and that a campus can be a stabilizing force. Even when classes are not in session.

Why It Matters to Students and Families

Students at a local charter school do not live in a separate Albuquerque. They share streets, parks, bus routes, and grocery stores with families who are one missed paycheck away from crisis. Many students see homelessness up close, even if they do not talk about it in class. When community partnerships like this one happen, they offer schools a chance to name what students already know: that hardship exists, that people respond to it in different ways, and that organized care can make real changes in real time.

For families, the story cuts two ways. On one side, it is practical: a well-run campus with modern facilities can serve more than one purpose. On the other side, it is cultural: when a school partners with organizations rooted in the city’s arts and music communities, it says that learning does not end with academics. It includes civic identity, service, and the skills that build leadership: planning, collaboration, problem-solving under pressure, and the ability to work with people from different worlds toward a shared goal.

None of that requires turning students into props for good publicity. It requires clarity about values and boundaries. It requires a school culture that treats service as a form of respect, not charity.

In that sense, the Christmas morning kitchen work offers a model: a professional food service organization providing hands-on guidance, adults doing the work, volunteers running a tight operation, a school providing the space, and the focus kept where it belongs, on people who needed food and warmth that day.

A Partnership at the Start of Something Bigger

This was the first time MAS Charter School and Canteen of Central New Mexico partnered with ABQ Give Grub. First-time partnerships are where many good ideas may fail, because the logistics are unforgiving: access, supervision, food safety, timing, keys, cleanup, security. Getting it right means someone did real coordination long before anyone cracked an egg.

It also means there is a foundation for what comes next.

ABQ Give Grub’s Community Unity Winter Fundraiser Series is designed as a season, not a single day. The group has long argued that need does not end after Dec. 25. In the same news coverage, Martinez pointed to the cold months that follow the holidays. “We always felt a little bad only doing Christmas,” he said. “People need help long after Christmas and the coldest months are January and February, so that’s when they need the most support.”

Valentine’s Day 2026 was already on the calendar as the next major moment. The season-long approach reflects a sharper understanding of winter hardship. It also reflects something schools like MAS understand well: consistency matters. Support works when it is predictable, not occasional.

For more information about ABQ Gives Grub, follow the organization through its Instagram account. 

In addition to Canteen of Central New Mexico, Rt. 66 Diner, and MAS Charter School, the following organizations are supporting ABQ Give Grub’s three-part Community Unity Winter Fundraiser Series:

• B. Ruppe & Spirit Stage: venue and community apothecary that hosted a fundraiser concert
• The Burque Beat: community-driven street newspaper that shares creative expression from people who are unhoused or housing insecure
• Center for Social Sustainable Systems (CESOSS): nonprofit partner and research center focused on acequia healing and education, based in the South Valley
• Health Equity Council: nonprofit that provides public health and harm-reduction resources, including naloxone (Narcan) and training
• La Luna at La Fonda: restaurant that has supported the Christmas meal event for eight years 
• Marble Brewery: venue that hosted a fundraiser concert
• Offworld Adventures: production company that organized fundraising concerts
• Sister Bar & Slow Burn Coffee: venues that hosted fundraising concerts
• Southwest Soldiers: local hip-hop musicians and a group of community advocates and organizers