Christmas 2025: Let Brenda Campbell cook

BY SHAWN LOUGHLIN

For Brenda Campbell, the well-known realtor and community champion in Seaforth, the holidays are largely about food. As a passionate cook, she says that, while she knows it would never happen, she’d love a house full of 100 friends and family members to feed for Christmas.

Not only does she relish her time in the kitchen around the holidays with her sons and other family members and friends, but she has, for years, made meals for neighbours and community members who may not have the means to make those meals for themselves. 

To this day, even after moving years ago, she returns to her former neighbourhood with meals for former neighbours and, through her work in realty in Huron County, she has donated a number of ready-to-make Christmas dinners that include everything from the turkey to the buns, even including a roasting pan for people who may not have one at home. This, she says, is what the holidays have always been about for her and her family, so it’s a tradition that she has kept up for years.

Seaforth is the community that Campbell has adopted for most of her life, helping people find homes and spearheading several community initiatives, such as Seaforth Summerfest and the community’s annual Easter Egg Hunt. However, she was not born here. Campbell was born and raised in Leamington and has come to love Seaforth as she’s grown into an adult and a family woman.

During that time, she has become part of the town’s very fabric through not just her work, but her volunteerism and visibility within the community, perhaps culminating earlier this year as she took on the role of chair for the Seaforth 150th Homecoming - an event that has been heralded by many as a tremendous success.

It was for these reasons - and many more - that she was named the 2025 Citizen of the Year by The Citizen and North Huron Publishing earlier this year.

This year for the holidays she worked with her colleagues and another business in Seaforth to run a toy drive for kids in the area. Thanks in part to donations collected at the Seaforth Broomball Tournament over the weekend, the drive has been wildly successful, bringing in well over 150 toys that will be distributed in the coming days.

There have been years when she and her family have baked as many as 20 full-sized turkeys and distributed them around the county at the holidays, but this year the focus was on the toy drive.

And while much of this work has been done with her children over the years, that has continued as they’ve grown into being their own men, both returning to the community in which they grew up to find a career and build a life together. Her one son, Jake, is now working with her in the real estate world, while Robert has opened up his own accounting firm right next door to his mother’s real estate office in Seaforth. She says it means the world that they have chosen to return to Huron County to build their lives here and that continued connection means even more as the holidays roll around.

Speaking of young families building their lives together, the holidays, Campbell says, are a good reminder of why she loves what she does. She’ll often get e-mails or texts from clients who are marking life milestones in their new homes; putting up their first Christmas tree in their new house, their first holidays with children and more. To be able to play a small role in that process, she says, has been one of the absolute delights of her life.

Seeing those scenes play out in real time and knowing that young families are finding their place in the world with even just a small amount of help from her is very rewarding and she doesn’t take her place in that story lightly.

She may have to wait for at least one more year for her dream holiday meal, cooking for more than 100 people in one house, but there’s always next year.