What is Lobsterfest?

Lobsterfest XV was a great success!  Check back here next week for pictures and information on the whole day.

Lobsterfest is:

*an opportunity to have family fun on a gorgeous fall afternoon right in your own back yard. 

*an opportunity to enjoy fresh Maine lobster in Alabama. 

*a unique way to make a real difference in the lives of some people near and far that you will never meet. 

Father Bill Hudson first connected with Honduras in the late 1980s through Nuestras Pequeñas Rosas Home for Girls in San Pedro Sula.  Honduras is an incredibly poor nation, one of the few places in this hemisphere where you will see little children living alone on the streets.  Bill was touched by the efforts of Leo Frade, then the Episcopal bishop of Honduras, and his wife Diana, who founded this orphanage for abandoned and neglected little girls.  Bill spent several summers at Our Little Roses and gradually infected his home parish in Alabama with his love for the place.  Before his untimely death in 1992 at age 46, he became Canon to the Ordinary of Honduras—Bishop Frade’s right hand man in America.

When Kee Sloan arrived at St. Thomas in 1993, he encouraged our growing passion for Honduras.  We planned our first medical mission to Delicias Del Norte for 1995.  We quickly realized that we needed an unprecedented amount of money to adequately fund such an ambitious endeavor—more than the church could afford alone—and so Lobsterfest was born.  Borrowing the idea from an Episcopal church in North Carolina, we held our first Lobsterfest on October 22, 1994.

The idea was simple:  fly in a bunch of live presold lobsters from Maine, host a few craftsmen, and make a little money.  We committed to ourselves and our customers that every penny we made would be spent on the medical mission.  Not one cent would go into our general budget.  We sold 1200 lobsters that first year, 90% of them in the last nerve-wracking 72 hours.  We worked very hard and discovered to our surprise that the event brought our parish family together in a way we had not expected.  It was fun!  And we made some money, too, enough to send our first medical team to Honduras in June 1995. 


In October 1995 we held Lobsterfest 2.  In response to a concern that we should help those among us as well as those far away, we pledged to split the money we raised 50/50 between our Honduran medical mission and Habitat for Humanity in Madison County.  St. Thomas folks would help build the Habitat house right here.    

To this day, we run Lobsterfest exactly the same way.  It has resulted in medical missions to Honduras 14 years in a row; we’ve helped build 17 Habitat houses right here in Madison County.  Some years, like the year of Hurricane Katrina, we may allocate part of the money to especially urgent needs.  A few years ago we decided to share part of the bounty with First Stop, Huntsville's advocacy and support program for our homeless population.  The 2008 proceeds have been divided among the Honduras medical mission (50%), Habitat (25%) and First Stop (25%). 

Lobsterfest is much bigger than it was in 1994.  It is on the city’s social radar as one of those not-to-be missed community festivals. Today we usually order about 2500 live lobsters; we sell almost as many pounds of Charlie Erwin’s barbecue; we have crafters, musicians, kids’ activities, a bake sale, silent auction and a grand parish dinner/celebration the day after the main event.  EVERY PENNY GOES TOWARD THE HONDURAS MEDICAL MISSION, HABITAT FOR HUMANITY and FIRST STOP.  When you buy a lobster or a barbecue sandwich from us, you can rest assured that you are helping provide the people of Delicias with the only medical care they ever get; you know that someone in Madison County will get their own Habitat house, and someone who is homeless in Huntsville will get a little help.  This is the real deal; we practice what we preach. And we have a great time together in the process.

We can't wait until Lobsterfest XVI, tentatively scheduled for November 2009.