Eat the Turkey

In defense of tradition

I’ve long been a Thanksgiving maximalist. Celebrating from Wednesday-Saturday, parade-football-dinner-dessert-card games into the wee hours, no Christmas music or decoration until Black Friday at the earliest, etc.

Of course, while they are important to me, all of those are personal preferences.

However, this recent development of people ditching turkey for some meat they like better is one I see as a little more worthwhile of discussion. As it came up on this week’s Think Deeper Podcast episode, and drew a number of questions and comments, I figured now’s the time to flesh out why I think this matters so much.

With each passing year I see more people saying they are foregoing turkey in favor of some preferred entree, like steak or barbecue. “Turkey is dry and bland, and I like other things better,” the argument goes. “Why do I need to have turkey if I can have something better?”

Well, I’m glad you asked.

The first Thanksgiving occurred over 400 years ago. It’s not clear if turkeys were involved or when they became the centerpiece of the meal as the traditions came into shape, but one writing indicates it was standard by 1827. This means we have at least 200 years of turkey at Thanksgiving, at least eight full generations.

It’s far more important than we think to, as one commentator puts it, “live historically.” I am somebody’s son, grandson, great-grandson, and so forth. They lived and worked and served and I have a connection to them, whether I acknowledge it or not. I’ve also been blessed by them with a name and a history and traditions, and I owe it to them to be thankful for those things, honor those things, and hold on to the baton I’ve been handed.

Our rampant individualism wants to sever all these ties unless we feel they serve us in some obvious way. Since turkey doesn’t, we decide to trade it in for something we like better.

The question becomes, then: if everybody in my lineage treated this like I do, what would result?

The result would be that you wouldn’t have Thanksgiving. If every generation gets to slap their own meaning on to practices, fundamentally changing what they are, then it’s not long before the practices disappear. We don’t see the point in turkey. Maybe our kids or grandkids won’t see the point in having Thanksgiving at all.

To be honest, we’re well on our way there already—Black Friday and Christmas commercialism have already all but swallowed up Thanksgiving.

I pick this battleground over Thanksgiving’s main course because I see it as a microcosm of the mindset that is causing our cultural malaise, separating our families, and making church cohesion all but impossible.

We’re not so many disconnected atoms, all charting our own paths, and it’s important we act like we understand that. Is it really too much to let our ancestors outvote us on 1 dinner out of the 366 we’ll consume this year?

One of the points of holidays and the traditions that mark them is to bind us together with other people. Lore and culture are what bring us together, and coming together with others is what gives our lives deeper purpose and fulfillment. Part of our gratitude on this special day should be toward our forefathers who handed us such lore and culture to share with our families and with our neighbors.

But if I get to pick and choose what parts of the lore and culture I like, and you get to pick and choose the parts you like, we’re one or two generations away from all of us having our own private cultures, which would be no culture at all.

My working definition of culture is, “What we do here.” If “what we do here” is “I dunno, whatever you feel like doing,” we shouldn’t be surprised when we struggle to even feel like we’re part of an “us.”

That’s the point in all of this. It is about the turkey, but it’s also about much more than the turkey. It’s about whether we have eyes to see ourselves as part of something much bigger than ourselves.

With the holiday almost here and vacation calling my name, I’ll spare you a few hundred extra words and let you ponder the church and family implications of these mindset shifts. For now, I’ll leave it at this:

Eat the turkey. Give thanks for our predecessors who had the foresight to start and preserve traditions to hold and pass on through the generations. Teach your kids to eat the turkey, too, and tell them why we do it.

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