This week, the great abundance begins.
Soup kitchens are abuzz with earnest volunteers ready to help, and donation bins are overflowing with boxes and cans.
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How else are we supposed to deal with any guilt over our season of gluttony, other than by roping the needy into our bacchanal?
But once the last turkey tetrazzini is eaten and the dead pine trees are chipped into mulch, the giving urge often fades away. Julie Rosenthal, the mom who runs a small nonprofit called Food on the 15th, has seen it before.
“There is extra food in the bags today,” she tells her little army of helpers — 10- and 11-year-olds about to deliver food to needy senior citizens in Howard County. “Tell them NOT to give it away. They’re going to need it in January and February, when donations are slim.”
Some of the kids are a bit nervous. This is going to be way more intense than simply ferrying a can of cranberry sauce to class or decorating a pilgrim centerpiece for the local soup kitchen.
These Howard County kids — who are growing up in the third-wealthiest county in the nation — are about to come face-to-face with hunger.
In this case hunger is a stooped and smiling woman who has decorated the door to her small apartment in Ellicott City with silk flowers and happy signs.
“Oh, this is wonderful! The children are so beautiful!” trills Regina Peterson, 83, who grips her walker as she greets the children bearing bags of food, and really doesn’t want the kids to leave.
Down the hall, the kids encounter a less amicable senior who complains about the overabundance of tuna in the gift bags, wants something else and slams the door shut.
“Some people love the attention, some don’t,” shrugs Natalie Nichols, who is 10 and in fifth grade at Clarksville Elementary School. “That’s okay.”
Food on the 15th always makes it deliveries around the 15th of the month, when the Social Security checks begin to run out and tough choices between medication and food get made. It’s a year-round operation, not a feel-good, holiday-only effort.
The project, which has delivered 9,500 bags of groceries to hundreds of low-income seniors over the past six years, does more than teach kids about giving and sharing and the socioeconomic inequities among that 99 percent of us. It is designed to introduce children of affluence to people who are struggling.
“They’re all the same, people just like us, like our families,” says Lily Fredman, 10, after knocking on a bunch of doors. “Some have families visiting, some were watching football.”
Bingo! That’s the lesson Rosenthal wanted to teach six years ago, as she was facing the ultimate parenting challenge: how not to raise entitled brats.
“I thought my kids were way too focused on themselves. There was dance and drama and all that, but it was all about them,” says Rosenthal, an Asian Studies program management specialist at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. She needed something that would make her kids understand how privileged they were compared with others around them.
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