By Tony Wright
December was the ghastliest month for turkeys at the old family farm.
They spent the rest of the year strutting, clucking and gobbling, terrorising the dogs and running off strangers unwise enough to come down the drive without arming themselves with a stout stick.
Turkeys at the old farm were gangsters. terrorising the dogs and strangers coming down the drive.Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto
In the evenings, the gangster turkeys roosted grandly in a grove of cypress pines.
December, though, meant Christmas.
And Christmas meant roasted turkey.
My grandmother, raised in the north of England, demanded that a roasted turkey occupy the sacred centre of the long table that served as the seat of her family Christmas feast. Such a feast it was, designed for a snowy English winter and served on an Australian summer day.
Great glazed hams and bowls of roasted vegetables, shelled peas and a leg of lamb or two fresh from the wood-fired oven. Oysters in the shell on ice, steamed fish (my grandmother ate nothing but fish, despite her fuss about bringing turkey to her table), salads, mountains of cold cuts and fruit from the orchard paid some deference to the summer heat.
But soon we’d be deep in the imagined snow again with brandy-flamed puddings hiding sixpenny bits.
Grandkids, a squadron of us, circled the groaning table.
The turkey, stuffed with herbs, breadcrumbs, bacon and onion, awaited the carving knife.
We tried not to think of it in its arrogant prime, fanning its feathers and fixing us with beady eyes.
But we knew the truth.
Around mid-December, our grandfather began studying his flock, weighing up the fattest, most suitable turkey for the Christmas table.
Then came the chopping block and the axe.
The season, of course, has unearthed these old memories from my childhood.
That, and the recent presidential election in the United States of America.
Turkeys voting for Christmas, we might say.
We really shouldn’t dwell on that event, of course, lest we ruin the coming festive spirit.
Still, turkeys and US presidents have a long and rather weird relationship.
Only a few weeks ago, the outgoing president, Joe Biden, “pardoned” two turkeys at the White House ahead of Thanksgiving. Lucky birds.
President Joe Biden after pardoning the national Thanksgiving turkey last month.Credit: AP
Forty-six million less fortunate turkeys are consumed in the US during Thanksgiving, and millions at Christmas.
Possibly out of a sense of guilt at this mass slaughter, presidents have taken to making an ostentatious Pontius Pilate show of “pardoning” turkeys presented as gifts to the White House, freeing them to live out their lives at children’s farms and the like.
Ritual pardoning of turkeys began quite a while ago.
President Ronald Reagan took to sending gift turkeys off to retirement farms starting in 1981.
President George H.W. Bush gave the routine a sort of folksy blessing when animal rights activists were picketing outside the White House in 1989.
“Let me assure you, and this fine tom turkey, that he will not end up on anyone’s dinner table, not this guy – he’s granted a presidential pardon as of right now – and allow him to live out his days on a children’s farm not far from here,” said the senior Bush.
An easy stunt, really, when tens of millions of birds faced the oven or the giant deep fryer, this being America.
And vastly easier next year, we might ponder, for a president-in-waiting who wants to concentrate in camps millions of human migrants before deporting them to fates unknown and unthinkable.
But let us quell darkened thoughts at this time of the year.
The Christmas tree is trimmed, the lights are strung on the balcony and the memory of Christmases past occupy the thoughts.
Our grandmother led us in singing Christmas hymns while the turkey roasted.
She wanted us to know the meaning of Christmas was not really about Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.
One of her favourite hymns was O Come all Ye Faithful, exhorting us to come to Bethlehem and behold the King of Angels.
Easier said than done these days, alas. Bethlehem, considered by Christians the birthplace of Jesus, sits a few kilometres south of Jerusalem in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territory called the West Bank.
A worshipper prays next to the grotto believed to be the spot where Jesus was born at the Church of Nativity. Bethlehem was quiet last year and is expected to be even quieter this year due to the war in Gaza.Credit: Getty Images
Christians once streamed to Bethlehem for Christmas. Last Christmas and this, they’ve stopped coming, and reportedly no Christmas tree is being hoisted in its Manger Square.
Do we need to explain? Bethlehem, hemmed in by Israeli settlements, sits just 70 kilometres north-east of Gaza, surely the unhappiest, most tormented place on Earth. No peace on Earth and goodwill to men – or women and children – around such places right now.
So where were we? Yes. The turkey.
Why is the bird even called a turkey?
The world in the 1500s was perhaps simpler than ours, but just as confusing.
Turkish traders from the Ottoman Empire, based in Constantinople/Istanbul since 1453, ar said to have supplied the European and British markets with birds taken from sub-Saharan Africa.
Henry VIII
The birds – which we call guinea fowls – became known in England as Turkey-cocks for the simple reason that they were traded through what was known as the land of the Turks.
In the 1520s, British navigators sailing the Atlantic came across large wildly feathered birds native to the American mainland which, they apparently decided, looked rather like guinea fowls.
The sailors already had a handy name – Turkey-cocks – and so they attached the same name to the American birds, which they began bringing back to England in the 1520s.
By the 1540s, King Henry VIII – a man of prodigious appetites – ordered that a turkey replace his traditional roast goose on his vast Christmas table.
Anything good enough for the king was instantly popular in England, and remained so, right up until my grandmother’s girlhood.
And so, a turkey was required on her Christmas table in Australia to remind her of the world she had left behind.
Come this Christmas Day, I’ll ask for a serving of lobster or prawns, thanks.
Turkeys deserve all the pardoning they can get.