Young man accidentally invited to ‘grandma” Thanksgiving as a teenager celebrates 6 years of dinner together
Thursday marks the sixth year the couple has celebrated the holiday together. Hinton shared a photo on Twitter, writing “Thanksgiving 2021.”
The two first met in 2016 when Dench, from Mesa, Az., sent a text message inviting Hinton to dinner. It’s for her grandson who changed his phone number. Instead, Hinton, then 17, received the text while sitting in class at Desert Vista High School.
The two realized their mistake, then sent selfies to each other, and Hinton asked if he could come here. Dench texted, “Of course you can. That’s what grandmas do… feed everyone.”
Hinton told her social media followers last week that the two would be celebrating a day together again.
“We’re all gearing up for Year 6!” he wrote, along with a picture of a text message from Dench inviting him, his girlfriend Mikaela and his family to visit. He also included a photo of himself, Dench, Mikaela and Dench’s late husband Lonnie, who died in April 2020 after a battle with Covid-19.
Hinton has documented the annual holiday on her social media. In 2019, he shared a snap, writing, “So lucky to have such wonderful people in our lives.”
After Dench’s husband passed away, they still spent the holidays together.
“This Thanksgiving, along with all the holidays to come, won’t be like the holidays before but we’ll make the best of it,” Hinton wrote in a post last year. “Rest in peace to Lonnie and all the others we lost this year, we will miss you so much. Thank you for being in our lives.”
“I missed out on a great relationship,” Dench said, when asked what would have happened if she hadn’t invited Hinton years ago. “I changed my perspective a lot about the younger generation, and now looking back over the years, I didn’t change their lives; they changed me.”
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