Gobble Gobble Gobble

When I was growing up in the 1960s the only time we ate turkey was Thanksgiving and maybe Christmas. Now you can be sick of turkey year round. Smoked turkey, oven roasted turkey, pressed turkey, turkey pepperoni, turkey chili, turkey meatloaf, spaghetti and turkey, turkeys with breasts that would shame Dolly Parton--enough already!

I don’t mind the occasional deli type turkey sandwich. Sometimes nothing else will do. But turkey meatloaf? No. Meatloaf implies meat and meat, to me at least, has to have had a working nervous system at some point in its existence. Domestic turkeys have devolved to the point where tofu has more actual meatlike qualities. Turkeys have been so successfully bred for stupidity that a Vegan could eat one with no guilt whatsoever. They’ve also had the flavor bred out of them.

Or maybe it just seems that way because I have turkey every other meal. Time was this ubiquitous “meat” was a low priced substitute for ground beef. Now it’s being touted as a healthy substitute, so the price went up, in many cases higher than lean ground beef or pork sausage. That’s worth it, you say, because ground turkey has less fat than ground beef and turkey sausage has less fat and sodium than pork sausage. Right?

Not necessarily. Awhile back my wife, in her never ending quest to inflict healthy food on me, brought home some turkey Italian sausage. It didn’t taste too awful; in fact it barely had any taste at all. I added some to pot of vegetable soup I was cooking and danged if that didn’t turn out to be about the greasiest soup I ever tried to gag down. I compared the nutritional information on the label to a package of the brand of pork sausage that I had quit buying for health reasons. And guess what? The total fat content, both saturated and un, was almost exactly the same. In fact the pork product had less sodium and it cost less per pound. Neither one was especially good for you, but at least the pork tasted good.

Other Thanksgiving and Christmas staples seem good primarily because you only get them during the holidays. Even though pumpkin pie filling (the sole ingredient in the can is listed as “pumpkin”) is available all year round and nobody I know has ever used fresh pumpkin guts as filling, you only see pumpkin pies at Thanksgiving and Christmas. Everybody makes a big show about how good it is, but I’ve never seen anybody go for seconds. Folks make a big deal about it because Dear Old Aunt Sukey went to all that trouble to make it, bless her heart. The fact is, either Dear Old Aunt Sukey only makes it because she thinks everybody actually likes the stuff or she’s having a good laugh at your expense. (That’s what I intend to do when I get really old, assuming that miracle comes to pass; mess with your mind just like Dear Old Aunt Sukey,)

Cranberry sauce is another item that only graces the table during the holidays. If you buy too much one year, the extra cans will patiently bide the years unmolested until you blow the dust off of one of them and blop the contents out onto a plate. Cranberry juice you can get all year, but the only way I can stomach it is to dilute it with vodka.

Sweet potato casserole with marshmallows is another holiday “treat”. That stuff is so sweet it makes my dentures hurt. It’s kind of like candy that doesn’t taste good; the candy corn of holiday fare. Nobody really likes it but it’s traditional. Well, so is the death penalty.

Most families have holiday foods that are peculiar (and I do mean peculiar) to that household. In our family it was my father’s infamous Cracker Salad. All it was was a chilled mixture of crushed saltine crackers, diced tomatoes and mayonnaise. It actually tasted pretty good, but it looked like a chainsaw accident in a bowl. No guest would eat it or even look directly at it, and no one in the immediate family would eat it out of sheer embarrassment. Daddy would tuck right in, extolling its virtues while the rest of us silently shuddered in horror.

Nobody enjoys eggnog at Thanksgiving. Nobody enjoys it at Christmas either, even though everyone pretends to. Let’s face it, eggnog is vile. Basically eggnog is a mixture of raw eggs and booze, a perfect recipe for vomit. Throw in a likely case of salmonella and voila! the kind of hangovers they serve in Hell.

Fruitcake? A practical joke that got out of hand.

Yet somehow each Thanksgiving and Christmas average Americans manage to gain enough weight to throw the planet’s orbit out of round clean into the New Year. And somehow Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners still manage to be the essence of Heaven right here on Earth.