I’m Fixing to Get Me a Wild Turkey!
I’m fixing to get me a wild turkey!
The simplest way to get your Thanksgiving turkey is to go to the store and pick one out of the freezer. Or you can buy several hundred dollars worth of stuff you don’t really need at the store and get a free turkey.
You can forget about going out and shooting yourself a wild turkey for Thanksgiving because turkey hunting season in Georgia is in March, April and May. I suppose you could shoot one next spring and freeze it.
Or you could raise one. I had a friend who took up turkey farming and he was always attempting to breed a bigger and better turkey. He was particularly fond of turkey legs so he continuously experimented with raising a turkey with more than two legs. One day he called all his friends and said, “I did it! I finally did it! I have bred a turkey that has six legs!”
Of course everyone wanted to know how those legs tasted. “I don’t know,” he said, “they’re so fast I can’t catch ‘em!”
If you do decide to hunt one of those tasty wild birds, you ought to know they can run up to 25 miles per hour, faster than any human. They can also fly up to 55 miles per hour. So the easiest thing to do is go to the grocery store and let one fly into your shopping cart.
Their vision is also much sharper than humans and they can view their entire surroundings simply by turning their heads. And they roost as high as 50 feet up in the trees.
If you are fortunate enough to bag one you should also know that you will have to clean as many as 6,000 feathers off them. These feathers keep them warm and dry. Most of the feathers of the male are iridescent, with varying colors of red, green, copper bronze and gold, and allow him to show off to the opposite sex. I know some men like that, and I also call them “Turkeys.”
No matter where your Thanksgiving turkey comes from, the average cook takes at least two whole days to prepare for Thanksgiving dinner, but most kids don’t really care. I have taken an informal but conclusive survey and have discovered that if Twinkies came with drumsticks, as far as kids are concerned, all turkeys could die of old age.
There is, however, a kind of wild turkey which has no feathers and you don’t even have to cook it. It never goes out of season and you don’t have to hunt it, clean it or stuff it. It already has a complex layering of almonds, honey, blackberries and leather. It is hand-selected at the peak of its maturity and once won a gold medal for its superiority.
As soon as I finish Thanksgiving dinner I’m fixing to have a sip of it.