In a previous life, Anthony never went to bed hungry and always had a roof over his head. Starvation, he says, shouldn’t exist in Canada.

“If you want to starve, you go to my old country,” he said.

Anthony, who declined to share his name, emigrated in 1960 from Calabri, a province in the south of Italy, where his family farmed land they didn’t own, eating what they could grow. Born on St. Anthony’s Day (June 13), he was named after the saint, but doesn’t feel blessed.

“I’m ashamed of where I am,” said the 62-year-old man, pausing and looking away, his mischievous eyes tearing up on the corners. “Do you think anyone wants to be here? People here are so down on their friggin’ luck, it’s terrible.”

After his wife died, Anthony sold his house. He says he “blew through that money” in one year, and ended up living in a park before he discovered the Scott Mission — a non-denominational, faith-based street mission in downtown Toronto, serving the city’s less fortunate.

For the third Christmas in a row, Anthony is sitting in the Mission’s meal room at Spadina Ave. and College St., which by noon was bustling with some 100 people enjoying a warm Christmas meal on a cold, snowy day.

On this morning, the meal room is a cacophony of sounds: the clangs of metal pots being stirred and emptied in the kitchen; the creaks of the shelf-rack being wheeled in, carrying trays upon trays of food; the shuffle of the footsteps of some 35 staff and volunteer men and women making sure every table has a place mat, cutlery, a drink, a note with a prayer or a season’s greeting and, this year, a special cookie a donor has prepared.

Through the walls, you hear the faint sounds of Christmas carols playing in the room next door, as 250 of Toronto’s homeless and less fortunate gather for the second busiest day at the Mission (the first is Thanksgiving).

On this day, 80 pounds of potatoes, 50 litres of soup, a bunch of turkeys and more are prepared, beginning at 7 a.m.; each meal costs about $4.25.

It’s a meal that has become one of Holly Thompson’s Christmas traditions. Every Dec. 25 for the past six years, she has stood and greeted people and watched them read the little note on their place mat, written by donors.

“It means something to them,” said Thompson, a spokesperson for the Mission. “Christmas is hard for people who live on the streets . . . It’s important for there to be somewhere they can go, a place for community.”

Scott Mission, said Anthony, gave him back hope.

“This place is the greatest place in the world,” says Anthony. “It gives you friendship, people to talk to. You’re not on the street alone, talking to yourself like a fool. You communicate, here.”

Peter Duraisami, the CEO of the Mission, believes things are getting harder for the city’s poor, where affordable accommodation is hard to find.

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“The level in which people are suffering has increased,” he said.

Duraisami has watched students come in to get the Mission’s lunch services. Rent has gone up in the city, he says, and people have fallen into an unfortunate cycle. “If I was homeless, and I had nobody, nothing, and I don’t know where my next meal is coming from, I don’t know how I would’ve been,” he says.

“It’s just not the food you give,” Duraisami continued. “When I start talking to people like Anthony, it’s worth my Christmas. It’s worth more.”