Lick a stamp, send a turkey

Something unusual happened to me this month: I received a Thanksgiving card.

I mean, it’s not completely unheard of. Years ago, when I worked in sales, I had a customer who insisted on giving each of his clients a card at Thanksgiving instead of at Christmas.

He said it bypassed the whole “should it say Happy Holidays or Merry Christmas” falderol (the alleged War on Christmas was a thing even 30 years ago, it seems) and, as a bonus, the card became a conversation piece because it was unique.

He was right, at least as it relates to the greeting I received decades later. “Oh, look,” I said, as though I were a character in an early-reader Dick and Jane book. “It’s a card, a Thanksgiving card from my insurance agent. See the card. What a special card. I must hang it on my wall. Jane, will you help me hang it? Will you help me hang my card on the wall?”

Spoiler Alert One: The card never made it to the wall.

Spoiler Alert Two: I didn’t think like Dick and Jane. I’m not really a Dick.

Still, the card did get me thinking about the somewhat odd practice of sending Thanksgiving greetings. Hallmark says Americans send 16 million cards annually to commemorate the fourth Thursday of November. More accurately, the company said Americans “exchanged” them, which makes me think of a giant swap meet with cardstock images of Norman Rockwell-esque dinner tables, cranberries and stuffing. I’ll trade your candied yams for two slices of pumpkin pie with whipped cream!

Spoiler Alert Three: It didn’t really make me think of this.

By way of comparison, Hallmark says Americans send 1.3 billion Christmas cards annually, so Santa has cooked Tom Turkey’s goose in that department.

All this sent me on a nostalgic stroll through Internet images of Thanksgiving cards past, courtesy of clickamericana.com, which offers 14 such cards allegedly from the turn of the last century. (Since it’s on the Internet, it’s hard to know for sure.)

A common theme across many of the images is a woebegone attempt to turn living turkeys into a holiday symbol in much the same way that Santa has come to represent a secular Christmas. One key difference is revelers don’t chow down on roasted St. Nick at the climax of the Yule season, so any attempts to transform Tom Turkey into a fun-loving harbinger of late November must reckon with the oven at the end of the tale.

The images offer lushly painted images of kids petting turkeys or shyly offering ears of corn to the birds. In one, two turkeys − I would assume husband and wife, but I can’t speak to the matrimonial customs of genus Meleagris − are out for a Sunday (or is that Thursday?) drive in an open-top automobile. While their progress appears leisurely, perhaps they are really putting the pedal to the metal, or the shank to the crank, to escape the cook’s hatchet.

Some of the cards have sentiments straight out of squaresville. They are also examples of exceedingly poor verse. One reads, “I welcome this day of mellow fruitfulness, As just one more occasion to wish you happiness.”

Another unimaginatively offers, “May all your dreams come true Thanksgiving Day.” A third promises “good wishes for Thanksgiving Day,” accompanied by a freshly killed turkey, its head still attached.

Maybe it’s not so hard to see why Thanksgiving cards have failed to become an enduring custom.

Nevertheless, some copywriter scored with this message: “While we indulge in the prosperity and pleasures of the present, let us have high hopes for the future.”

That sounds so nice I’m going to put it in all the Thanksgiving cards I send out this year.

Spoiler Alert Four: C’mon, you know better.

Reach Chris at chris.schillig@yahoo.com. On Twitter: @cschillig

The turkey — America's national bird?

Originally published in The Alliance Review in 2008. 

If Ben Franklin had succeeded in enshrining the turkey as our national bird, would we be eating eagle on Thanksgiving?

It’s one of life’s little imponderables. Either way, the turkey is a bird that needs some positive PR. Unlike beef and chicken, it has no fast-food representation. There is no McTom, no BK Gobbler, no Turkey McNuggets value meal.

Instead, the language is rife with negative turkey connotations. Everybody’s dated at least one turkey, and people who “gobble” up food are considered hogs (another animal that needs spin control). Hearing “tough turkey” means you’re not getting your way, and the loser of a fight is trussed up or stuffed like a turkey. Synonyms for turkey include failure, dud, bomb, washout and fiasco.

About the only positive reference comes in bowling, where three consecutive strikes earns the roller a “turkey,” but he’s still, you know, bowling, so how cool can it be, really?

To be fair, nobody likes being called a chicken or a cow, either, but at least both those animals are adequately represented on the dinner menu at home or in restaurants. Outside of a 6-inch turkey breast at sub shops or the rare turkey burger on health-food menus, old Tom is the least respected of the meats.

No, the turkey gets one blip on the public radar, November, when the White House issues a presidential pardon for one of his brethren, but 45,999,999 more go under the ax to serve as the centerpiece of our Thanksgiving meals. According to the Associated Press, shoppers won’t get a break on the bird at the grocery store, either: The average cost of a 16-pound bird is up $1.46 over last year.

The eagle, meanwhile, protected as he is by federal law, gets all the positive euphemisms – eagle eyes, Eagle Scout, legal eagle, and double eagle. A five-dollar gold piece issued from 1795 to 1916 and in 1929 is a half eagle, which even sounds weighty, and the bird is all over money and stationary, portrayed as strong, powerful – and inedible. Maybe we have a psychological need to mock in language the animals we eat.

Ben Franklin, however, had no love for the eagle. In a letter to his daughter, he wrote, “… I wish the eagle had not been chosen the representative of our country. He is a bird of bad moral character. He does not get his living honestly. You may have seen him perched on some dead tree near the river, where, too lazy to fish for himself, he watches the labor of the fishing hawk; and when that diligent bird has at length taken a fish, and is bearing it to his nest for the support of his mate and young ones, the eagle pursues him and takes it from him.

“With all this injustice, he is never in good case but like those among men who live by sharping and robbing he is generally poor and often very lousy. Besides he is a rank coward: The little king bird not bigger than a sparrow attacks him boldly and drives him out of the district.”

Later in the same letter, Franklin praises the turkey as “a much more respectable bird, and withal a true original native of America . . . He is besides, though a little vain and silly, a bird of courage, and would not hesitate to attack a grenadier of the British Guards who should presume to invade his farm yard with a red coat on.”

Given many Americans belief in entitlement, or taking something for nothing, maybe the eagle as described by Franklin isn’t such a bad symbol after all.

Maybe the rest of us, who work everyday and hand over our eagle-imprinted money to those who don’t, are the real turkeys. It’s another imponderable to consider this Thanksgiving.