Thanksgiving Editorial

Jeff Green | Oct 08, 2009

One of the comforting aspects of Thanksgiving is that it is a dinner with very little variation; it is the same dinner wherever you go.

Some particulars may vary, but Thanksgiving dinners should include turkey, stuffing, gravy, potatoes, squash, cranberry sauce, a green vegetable (salad will do), and pumpkin pie (apple pie is an added option). You can fiddle around the fringes of it, serve a light-bodied red or a white wine or both, but the menu is basically set.

Thanksgiving is a harvest meal, and that means that for many, at least part of the meal, even if it only the garlic or the squash, is home-grown or grown by a neighbour or friend.

There is not much stress in Thanksgiving, Certainly it is more easy going than Christmas.

But here’s the rub. Anyone who really wants to get into the spirit of the thing, and anyone who calls themselves a virtuous “local” eater, should produce absolutely everything on the Thanksgiving table, with the possible exception of the cranberries (which not too many people grow).

Now this presents a complication when it comes to the turkey. Other than copping out and buying one, there are two ways to produce a turkey for the table: raising one or shooting one.

This is where the stress comes in for me. I don’t raise poultry; not too many people do anymore, although I have thought about it. I’ve also thought about going to the moon, and about becoming a millionaire, but those are other stories.

As far as turkey hunting, I don’t hunt. I’m not even that good at trapping mice, to tell the truth.

And even experienced hunters will tell you that hunting wild turkeys is hard (it’s not that hard to hunt domestic turkeys but it is illegal and not very neighbourly)

It doesn’t seem that it would be so hard to hunt turkeys, because it is now rather common to see 15 or 20 turkeys lolling about in a field or beside the road.

But as soon as you approach them to take a picture, you notice they stay just out of range of a camera – or a shot gun. As you move slowly towards them they move slowly away, and when you start to move more quickly they move more quickly.

They seem to have a sixth sense for the degree of separation they need to maintain in order to stay out of range.

And apparently, wild turkeys, once they are finally killed, are pretty difficult to de-feather. In fact it is apparently easiest to remove the skin entirely. But then they dry out in cooking, and are a bit gamey, nothing like the tender white meat from a domestic bird.

So, perhaps it is best to buy a turkey after all, but that makes us less virtuous, less committed to the harvest holiday concept of Thanksgiving.

It presents an for insecurity, a chance for those who raise poultry, or can hunt and clean turkeys properly, to lord their superiority over those of us who are incapable of doing either.

So, there we have it; one more holiday, seemingly innocent, seemingly a break from the drudgery of daily life, that really is nothing more than an opportunity for creeping insecurity and regret.

Pass the cranberry sauce.