Everyday Canvas

Thanksgiving

The entirety of life, and even its hard parts, is made up of tiny moments. If we miss the tiny moments, don’t we miss the whole? So I like to give thanks for all tiny moments. The moments I spend with family and friends and all the wonderful ones I spend with my WdC friends from behind the computer screen. Any kind of acclaim or whatever feast I am fed comes way after that.

“Thanksgiving comes to us out of the prehistoric dimness, universal to all ages and all faiths. At whatever straws we must grasp, there is always a time for gratitude and new beginnings.”
J. Robert Moskin

While grasping at the straws with gratitude, an article I read yesterday sent shock waves through my appreciation of the holidays. Darn it, I know I should never read about the turkey business and turkey farms and such, on the day before Thanksgiving, but I did. What little I have retained is in the dropnote below. Click on it at your own risk.

About turkeys ▼

In the wild, turkeys live up to ten years. Not so when they are hatched and bred for slaughter. After turkey babies are hatched under a heat lamp, without any turkey mommies, they are huddled together in large windowless sheds, thousands of turkeys to a shed with standing room only, and they stay there until the end of their lives. To keep turkeys from killing each other parts of their toes and beaks are cut off. When they are five months old, they are sent to a slaughterhouse. Some of them die on the way due to overcrowding. Each year during the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays 300 million turkeys are killed. How inhumanely they are killed, I am not even going there.

Oh well, now that I’ve written and somewhat hid in a dropnote what has been bothering me since yesterday morning, I have to write a fact about myself. I never liked the turkey meat. I do eat it though, only in Thanksgiving, especially because someone has gone through the trouble of preparing it.

Despite the turkey business, I enjoy the holidays a lot because they bring people together, and today, I swallowed up my dislike for the way we treat all animals in general and ate a small slice of a turkey breast. Regardless of anything, we had a very nice time with friends and family, and some painstakingly prepared food. The wine was the best part. By the time, deserts were up, I couldn’t eat any because I was so full. Pie and wine alone, I think, would make a better Thanksgiving feast to be served up front before the main course.

Yet, the best part of any holiday is the time spent with nice people, no matter what we eat, and I am so very grateful for a wonderful day with family, old friends, and a couple of new friends we met today. The miracle of this year’s Thanksgiving has been the people I connected with, and for that alone, I am deeply thankful.