Happy New Year and welcome to the second decade of the 21st Century. The lengthy and restful holiday period has provided inspiration for this entry and, as we prepare for the year ahead, I have three observations to share.
First, the Christmas and Hanukah season is a period of great celebration including the luxury of quality time with family and friends. But it’s also a season of excess: too much food, drink, sweets, and late nights. By the time we awake on January 1st, most of us are begging for a couple of quiet days and nights – a chance for our feet to come down to earth and really relax after exams, weeks of preparations and seasonal parties.
This was not the case for 43 year-old Donna Simpson from New Jersey who currently weighs about 600 lbs. – and has a goal of becoming the world’s heftiest woman, hoping to eventually reach 1,000 lbs! She has a website where people pay to watch her eat, consuming over 12,000 calories per day. She’s a poster girl for North American excess! All by herself, here’s what Mrs. Simpson ate on Christmas Day – an unbelievable 30,000 calorie gluttonous holiday feast:
• two 25 lb turkeys
• two maple-glazed hams
• 15 lbs. potatoes
• 5 loves bread
• 5 lbs turkey stuffing
• 4 pints gravy
• 4 pints cranberry sauce
• 20 lbs. vegetables
Unbelievable – one person. Mrs. Simpson definitely wins the gold star for excess in this age of excess.
A second observation over the holiday relates to all the end-of- year lists that are so popular during the week between Christmas and January 1st. You know what I mean: the year’s top songs, news events and so forth. Did you know that at the end of the year researchers told us that Canadians spend more time online than people in any other nation? We’re particularly fond of YouTube. According to a new international study, the average Canadian spends 42 hours online every month, including the viewing of 147 short videos/month. This is 50% more than any other country. So, as a nation we’re probably pleased that Time Magazine’s Person of the Year for 2010 was Mark Zuckerberg, the 20-something multi-billionaire creator of Facebook – an idea/tool that seems to have had more impact on Canadians than any other nationality in the world.
My third and final observation came on a short 5-day visit to Cuba. Cuba remains a communist country with very different standards for foreign tourists and locals. Beyond the hotels, beaches and comfort reserved for foreign visitors is the dilapidated Cuban infrastructure and a broken economy. I found out that virtually all basic foodstuffs are rationed and, for the past several weeks, milk has not been available to Cubans. However, as a foreigner I could by milk at a very inflated price – 25 times what Cubans pay. So the day that I visited Old Havana and hoped to buy a piece of Cuban art work, things turned out differently. While walking in the old city, I met a young father and several mothers who were desperate to find milk for their babies. I offered to buy some milk, but that still required two hours of walking and searching in Old Havana, as there was no milk to be found in the first 10 stores we visited. Finally we found the milk and thankfully, five families were happy. I didn’t find the Cuban painting I hoped to buy, but I did manage to do something in keeping with the spirit of giving that underpins the season, and I do feel better for it.
Excess, Canadians on the Internet, and alleviating some of the suffering of neighbours in one of the world’s last communist states. I learned a lot while on my break. I hope you did too.–Christopher Shannon, Headmaster