AZ Grandma, Stranger She Accidentally Texted To Spend 7th Thanksgiving

MESA, AZ — Arizona’s “accidental grandmother,” Wanda Dench, is having Jamal Hinton over for Thanksgiving dinner again Thursday, continuing a tradition that began with a wrong number in 2016.

The happy mixup occurred when Dench sent a group message to family members inviting them to her house on Thanksgiving six years ago. One of her grandsons had changed his telephone number six months earlier without telling her, so the text message went to Hinton instead.

Hinton, then 17, was skeptical. He sent a text back, asking for a photo to confirm that his grandmother had indeed sent the invitation. Dench obliged, sending a selfie. Hinton had never seen the blonde-haired woman in glasses.

“You’re not my grandma,” he replied. “Can I still get a plate tho?”

In Dench’s world, there’s always room at the table for one more.

“Of course you can,” Dench replied, punctuating her text with an emoji of a piece of cake. “That's what grandmas do … feed everyone.”

Dench, now 65, and Hinton, now 23, have shared Thanksgiving dinner every year since, even managing a get-together in 2020. It was a more somber occasion, because Dench’s husband, Lonnie, had died of complications of COVID-19 a few months earlier.

By that time, Hinton was family.

“As some of you may have already found out tonight, Lonnie did not make it,” Hinton wrote on Twitter. “He passed away Sunday morning but Wanda told me all the love and support he was receiving put a huge smile on his face so I thank every single one of you guys for that!”

“We miss you Lonnie,” Hinton wrote in a tweet sharing a video of him and Dench together after her husband died.

Fast forward to 2022. The two international viral celebrities will be getting together for their seventh Thanksgiving dinner together.

“To answer all your questions, yes Thanksgiving year 7 is planned out!” Hinton wrote in a post on Instagram Tuesday. “See you guys Thursday!”

Why Isn’t This A Movie?

And there were a lot of questions about the Dench-Hinton Thanksgiving tradition.

“You know what,” one person commented, “even if things are not so great in the world right now, I’m glad this really wholesome tradition is still going!”

“I love seeing this year,” wrote another. “Wishing you both an early Happy Thanksgiving from Canada!”

“Hell yes! I’m not American and don’t celebrate Thanksgiving, but this tradition is the cutest thing ever.”

“The Thanksgiving tradition I never knew I needed,” someone else said. “Cheers to many more years!”

Others said the tradition is the stuff of movies.

Indeed it is. Netflix said late last year it is making a feature film, “The Thanksgiving Text,” though it’s unclear when it will be released.

“We are excited to share our story with the world. We hope it inspires more people to reach out and make connections that they wouldn’t ordinarily make,” Dench and Hinton said in a joint statement last year. “We are so blessed to find a genuine friendship brought together by God from a mistaken text message.”

‘He’s Changed My Life’

When Dench realized six years ago that she had just texted and invited a stranger to her home for dinner, it never occurred to her to retract the offer.

“I grew up in the military,” she said in a video of the 2018 gathering Hinton posted on YouTube. “My dad was in the Navy and my husband … was in the Army and we moved around a lot, so I was always going to new places. And so strangers were not strangers to me.

“Family is more than blood,” she added. “It’s the people you want to be with.”

It’s difficult — and perhaps pointless — to speculate who has benefitted the most from a relationship that brought two very different people together.

“Jamal taught me that age made absolutely no difference. I love all of my grandkids and kids, but we all are different generations and we all reminiscence about different things,” Dench has said, according to NBC’s “Today” show. “But when Jamal came along, my husband and I and him and his girlfriend, we would go out to dinner throughout the year together and we would just lose all track of time.

“One time, we were at a restaurant for three or four hours and I couldn’t believe we were there that long. We kept talking! It was just such a wonderful conversation.

“That’s when it dawned on me that there doesn’t have to be a generation gap to have friendships. So now I look at a lot of young people in a different light than I used to and I make it a point to talk and get to know them.

“He’s changed my life a lot, I know that.”