First, Diane Wamhoff went to Brazil to work with children infected with AIDS to try to find what she had lost. She didn't find peace or purpose there. Then, in 2002, she joined a friend's mission trip to Honduras to help build a place for homeless girls. When a nun offered to take her and a few others to a remote mountain to visit a village, she continued on the search that had propelled her from her comfortable, suburban life.

Her only son, Timmy Ellison, had died in a car accident almost a decade earlier, when he was 23. There is a deep emptiness that accompanies that sort of loss.

She understood hardship from her own childhood. The eldest of eight children, Wamhoff remembers wondering why Santa left just one small gift for her while her friends received so much more. She grew up putting cardboard in her shoes to make them last longer.

But, on the mountain near the village of Guaymitas, she confronted the most abject poverty she had ever seen in her life.

Wamhoff stood there and saw children forced to eat grass and weeds to survive. When the nun asked if they would be able to help build the kitchen that the rundown school needed to provide government-funded rice and beans, Wamhoff recalls the church saying it didn't have the money. So, she raised her hand. "I'll do it." This was a way she could keep her son alive in people's hearts. Afterward, she considered it a message from her child and her God.

"Timmy was saying, 'This is it, Mom,' and God was saying, 'This is what you've been looking for.'" She came back home to St. Charles, Mo., where her husband runs a financial planning business, and told him: "Guess what, honey. We're going to take care of a hundred kids in Honduras."

"Okay, we'll have a golf tournament," he said. The moment changed their lives. A kitchen begot a generator, which helped power a new building, which turned into a vocational school, which eventually became a high school. Their golf tournaments and fundraisers have brought in about a million dollars over the past decade. They go to deliver money and supplies and work on projects about six times a year.

Wamhoff, 65, is an unlikely benefactor in this Central American republic. More than two-thirds of the population lives in poverty. The murder rate is among the highest in the world, partly because of its pivotal spot in the drug traffic moving from South America into the United States. The country recently held its first open election since a coup overthrew the government in 2009.

The Wamhoffs recognize how much more dangerous the country has become since they started. They now hire three armed security guards to ride with them during the hourlong drive from the airport to the mountain, and have the armed guards stay at the compound with them. "It's kind of scary," she said, about the ride from the airport.

She only knows one word in Spanish, "bonita," and pronounces "tortilla" with an "l." She says knows the faces of the children in the school, although she can't remember their names.

The importance of keeping Timmy's memory alive to his mother is evident in how much is named in his honor. The initial project was called Angel Timmy's Kitchen, there is Angel Timmy Grade School and Angel Timmy's High School -- the mountain itself is now informally called Timmy's Mountain, Wamhoff said. The families there know who he is.

When she first arrived, there was one person on the mountain with a sixth-grade education, Wambuff said. Last year, more than 150 children attended the school and nutrition program. Eleven students have graduated from high school, seven of whom are going to college. One of her "kids" is in medical school, she says, as proud as if it's her own child's accomplishment.

The child she lost is as present in her life as ever. She talks to him frequently. "When I talk to Timmy I say, 'Well, I hope you're proud of your mother now.'"

Retailers who spit in the eye of families this Thanksgiving have been waging a bigger war against workers for much longer than just this holiday season.

Wal-Mart, Target, Best Buy, Kmart, Macy's, Michael's, Kohl's, J.C. Penney, Toys R Us and many shopping malls will open as early as 6 p.m. Thursday. I'll bet many more follow suit next year as retailers try to get a jump on the competition during this critical sales period.

Some of us remember when Macy's was known for a parade on Thanksgiving rather than asking its employees to ditch their families on a national holiday to stand behind a register all night. My mother has worked in retail for more than a decade, since before Federated Department Stores bought the May Company and the Red Apple Sales of Foley's became the One Day Sales of Macy's. She has worked every Black Friday, of course, despite long hours of Sultan family gluttony and shenanigans the day before.

She said she was spared the Thanksgiving shift because many seasonal, part-time and younger workers volunteered for the overtime work.

At least on Thanksgiving, many of these workers will earn a living wage.

There are low-wage workers in other industries who have always had to work on Thanksgiving. If you fill up your car at a gas station, grab a prescription at a drug store or watch a movie at the theater, someone is at the register to take care of business.

It's easier to get upset about an assault on what has become a symbol of The Family Meal than the larger issue of what happens to families the remaining 364 days of the year.

Consider the Canton, Ohio Wal-Mart holding a food drive among its low-wage workers for their even worse-off co-workers.

"Please donate food items here so associates in need can enjoy Thanksgiving dinner," read a sign next to several bins set out for donations.

Wal-Mart's CEO, Mike Duke, makes $20.7 million a year while many of his workers rely on government subsidies -- provided by taxpayers by way of programs such as food stamps and Medicaid -- because it's nearly impossible for a family to meet its basic needs on the money from a full-time, minimum-wage job.

If this doesn't strike us as a broken model, then shame on us.

It's disingenuous to blame consumers for taking extreme measures to find a deal (after all, the stores wouldn't open if no one shopped that day, one line of justification goes) when it's harder to afford to buy goods for so many working families.

"... Corporate America as a whole has been so successful in squeezing the labor share of national income lower and lower that it's become a substantial constraint to businesses' ability to sell things to people," writes Matthew Yglesias, business and economics writer for Slate.

Shoppers willing to line up outside a big-box retailer at midnight are not to blame because they want (or need) to stay within a budget during the holidays.

Put the blame where it belongs: on our modern-day Scrooges, the top-level executives, the board members who reward themselves and their ilk with million-dollar bonuses, whose salaries are more than 300 times the average worker's. The ones who have seen their real income skyrocket while the rest of us have seen wages flatten or decline for years. And on the tight concentration of enormous wealth at the very top levels of income.

Today's Ebenezers could care less about holidays past, present or future. How many would be willing to do the work of one of their low-wage employees for one week and see how far that weekly pay stretches?

Let's remember this holiday season as the one when corporate America dropped the charade and proudly declared that profits trump family.

Let's make a play date for two rogue business executives.

Judging by their ideas about who should be buying their companies' clothes, they are bound to be besties.

Chip Wilson, co-founder of Lululemon Athletica, maker of $98 yoga pants for thighs that don't touch, meet Michael Jeffries, chief executive of Abercrombie & Fitch, maker of $30 black lace "bralettes" for trendy tweens and teens.

Wilson surprised a few potential customers with his recent remarks about the company's unintentionally see-through yoga pants and problematic fabric: "Some women's bodies just don't work for (our pants)," Wilson said to Bloomberg TV anchor Trish Regan. "It's about the rubbing through the thighs," Wilson said, and "how much pressure is there."

You've ruled out the female population with thighs that touch, Wilson, but you may have hit upon the exact demographic Jeffries is courting!

Jeffries admitted in a 2006 Salon interview that the brand goes after "cool" kids -- attractive and slim -- to wear their clothes, and shuns the rest: "A lot of people don't belong (in our clothes), and they can't belong. Are we exclusionary? Absolutely," he said.

That's putting an awful lot of stock in popular waifs, guys. And the message to girls is profoundly dangerous. Numerous news reports have documented the efforts of some girls and women wanting to achieve a "thigh gap," a space between your legs when you are standing. Pictures of underweight celebrities sporting this gap or jutting hipbones are used as "thinspiration" on message boards and Tumblrs.

I have a difficult time imagining how images associated with starving or seriously ill people can be sexy. But there is a vulnerable population for whom body image has become so warped, this is an ideal.

Both these executives can feel proud of themselves for promoting the same dangerous and unhealthy message.  

Thankfully, the skinnier market share has slimmed their stock prices. Abercrombie reported earlier this month a double-digit drop in quarterly comparable store sales and more than halved its full-year, adjusted profit forecast. Maybe there's room for Lulu to squeeze itself into that profit gap, after all. But the once red-hot, premium-priced yoga apparel has also cooled in light of the company's recall of nearly a quarter of its black Luon yoga pants. The stock price has fallen more than 8 percent in the past month.

It's questionable the extent to which CEO foot-in-mouth disease affects the bottom line. But it doesn't take an official boycott to tarnish a brand. A continuous drip of offensive and absurd comments from the leaders of a company can be enough to change that intangible perception of "exclusive" to "ew" in consumers' minds.

And as parents who care about the way companies market to our children, we can embrace the power of our pocketbooks.

Wilson's latest remarks may have further alienated a core constituency.

DeAnna Shires, a yoga instructor in the Dallas area, used to partner with the local Lulu store when it opened in her area in 2008. The studio she then owned served a diverse population, with many larger clients and those with injuries, she said.

"I was told from someone within (Lulu) that they didn't think my clientele was who they were looking for," she said. Shires stopped buying their clothes after that, and recently started speaking out for others in the yoga community to quit the brand, as well.

"If you are teaching acceptance and community ... are you OK with finding another pair of pants that are more in line with what you're teaching?" she said.

Oh, those pesky yogis with their "yoga values" and "community building," blah blah blah.

Ignore her, guys.

You carry on with your unabashed marketing to the "right" body type in the "right" crowd.

Jeffries, after all, made no apologies when his stores carried thong underwear with "eye candy" written across them for 10-year-old girls.

Not to be outdone, Wilson has blogged that "In the early 1970s, 'the pill' came into being ... Women's lives changed immediately. Men's lives didn't change however and they continued to search for a stay-at-home wife like their mothers. Men did not know how to relate to the new female. Thus came the era of divorces."

That's some interesting marketing.

Do let us know how you get along. We can't imagine a pair more deserving of one another.