Thanksgiving turkey – Christmas ham?

What a great feast we had at Thanksgiving!  Turkey, dressing, scalloped potatoes, corn, sugared carrots, salad, homemade bread, and of course, pumpkin pie.

After our Thanksgiving meal we had so much turkey left over, we cut it up and made soup with noodles and chicken broth.   It was delicious and we used up our left over homemade bread with lots of butter!

Now it’s time to shop for the Christmas meal.

So many choices.

Shall we do turkey again or ham?  Maybe some Cornish hens?  Scalloped potatoes or mashed?  Maybe some sweet potatoes?  Same salad or a different one?  Homemade bread again or shall we do dinner rolls?  And dessert?  Pecan pie, apple pie, banana pudding, peach cobbler?

So many choices.

That’s the story for most of us in the USA this year.  However, in many homes across the USA – and certainly in the rest of the world, it’s a totally different story.

What is the #1 health risk in the world today?

Hunger kills more people than AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined. Tonight as I crawl into bed stuffed after eating 3 good meals today and snacking on apples and popcorn while I watched TV, one in seven people in the world will go to bed hungry.

For some, there are so few choices.

Here are a few statistics on hunger in our world today.*

1. Over 300 million children go to bed hungry every day.
2. Every day, almost 16,000 children die from hunger-related causes. That’s one child every five seconds.
3. Undernutrition is a factor in one-third of all under-5 child deaths.
4. One out of four children – roughly 146 million – in developing countries is underweight.
5. 925 million people do not have enough to eat. 98 percent of them live in developing countries.
6. There are more hungry people in the world than the combined populations of USA, Canada and the European Union.
7. Asia and the Pacific region is home to over half the world’s population and nearly two-thirds of the world’s hungry people.
8. Women make up a little over half of the world’s population, but they account for over 60 percent of the world’s hungry.

While I am not suggesting that we should not enjoy our Christmas feast – I certainly plan to – I hope that we will do three things this Christmas season:

1. Before we begin our feasting, let us truly take time to thank God for allowing us to be born in a country and in a family where we have plenty to eat.
2. Let us look around us and see the needy in our own community, our own church, perhaps even in our own family – and DO SOMETHING to help make their Christmas a little better.
3. Let us purpose that in the coming year we will make some changes in our own spending habits and use the money saved to help someone else – in our city, our state, our country or around the world.

What better way for us to really “keep Christ in Christmas” than to remember those less fortunate than us.

*Sources: http://www.wfp.org, http://www.unicef.org, http://www.crin.org, http://www.fao.org, http://www.bread.org, http://www.who.int, http://www.childinfo.org