Dear Friends,
Today is “Leftovers Day,” when we eat turkey sandwiches, turkey noodle soup, and – an old friend’s favorite: turkey hash.
A quick Google search offers “9 Easy Thanksgiving Leftovers Recipes,” or the “25 Best Thanksgiving Leftover Recipes,” or, for the desperate, “31 Thanksgiving Leftover Recipes to Clear Your Fridge With” (pardon the grammar!). Creative cooks aren’t lacking for ideas! And then there’s the ever-helpful answer to the question: How long are Thanksgiving leftovers safe to eat? (The answer – three or four days in the refrigerator, so Monday at the latest.)
Needless to say, too much turkey can get tiresome. The children’s poet Jack Prelutsky (jackprelutsky.com) captures the feeling perfectly in his poem “Leftovers”:
Thanksgiving has been over
for at least a week or two,
but we’re all still eating turkey,
turkey salad, turkey stew,
turkey puffs and turkey pudding,
turkey patties, turkey pies,
turkey bisque and turkey burgers,
turkey fritters, turkey fries.
For lunch, our mother made us
turkey slices on a stick,
there’ll be turkey tarts for supper,
all this turkey makes me sick.
For tomorrow she’s preparing
turkey dumplings stuffed with peas,
oh I never thought I’d say this —
“Mother! No more turkey… PLEASE!”
Of course, it’s only those who have more than enough to eat who have the privilege of complaining about too many leftovers. For many – especially in those places where people are at war with one another – food and water are scarce.
The Holy Scriptures have many stories about crop failures, droughts, cities starving under siege, and widespread famine. Things have been hard for many for a long time.
But the Bible also has stories of abundance. Perhaps the most famous of them is the story of Jesus’ feeding 5,000 men – and, Matthew writes in his Gospel, “women and children besides,” so maybe 15,000 people were fed?
Do you remember that, at the end of the meal, there were leftovers. Matthew says, “Everybody ate and was satisfied, and they picked up twelve baskets full of broken pieces.”
I’ve long been intrigued, not only by how the story ends, but by how it begins. Twelve baskets of leftovers were gathered at the end of the meal, because someone shared “five loaves of bread and two fish.”
As you enjoy that turkey sandwich or that piece of leftover pie, find some way to share the abundance with which you’ve been blessed. If you want to help locally, consider the Toledo Food Bank. If you are looking for an Episcopal Church response to need throughout the world, there’s Episcopal Relief & Development. And the United Thank Offering has a $100,000 challenge grant, matching donations that will go to the Episcopal Diocese of Jerusalem.
Giving Tuesday is just four days away. You should have eaten all your Thanksgiving leftovers by then and be ready to share your abundance. Miracles happen when we do.
Blessings,
Stephen Applegate