Christmas, crowds, and charity

This started out as my reaction to the irony of a picture of a New Years Eve party for children.

First off, I didn't take the picture.  I was out with Community Policing that night, and I know that the kids didn't stay up until the new year: they were all out of there by 9 pm.

Secondly, if you look at the sides of the photo, you will notice how few people were actually there.  Sonja , although she does yeoman service in documenting everything that goes on around town, should have taken some tips from Hallmark movies.  Crowd scenes in Hallmark movies, even when they are supposed to represent events with thousands of attendees, never have more than thirty people in them.  But you have to crop and frame the shot so as not to give the game away:

Which got me in mind of Christmas.  I spent it at the Bread of Life, doing food prep, and then helping serve Christmas dinner, at lunchtime.  Part of the prep was cutting and plating 216 pieces of pie.  But, when we served lunch, I'd be surprised if we served even fifty plates.

When you are doing charity work, you can't be too concerned about efficiency in aspects of what you are doing.  For one thing, the clientele we were serving probably wouldn't (couldn't?) sign up in advance, to let you know how many to expect.  For another, the pies were donated, and, if not served, would have gone into the landfill anyway.  (The company donating them hadn't taken much care in packing them, and a lot of my work in plating the pieces involved reconstructing pies where the filling had slid out of the crust.)  In that situation, overpreparing is better than running out of food when more people than you expect show up.  The "effective altruism" movement (which took a big hit when FTX turned out to be a huge scam) to the contrary, charity can't always be based on efficiency.

Anyway, I hope, but do not, as yet, have any evidence to support any expectation, that, for you, the coming year will prove less disastrous than the last.

(I'm trying to work on a greeting that has less excess mindless toxic positivity than "Happy New Year!")