Welcome to another thanksgivng themed Family Lore! Content warnings: Food, bigotry, fire and explosions, knife mention, conspiracy theories and Ohio. Please mind the tags, your health and safety always come first.
It’s November of 2012 and the last time I’m going to Ohio on purpose. My grandparents had passed away within a week of each other that February and since my mom’s family had spent the last decade caring for them there was sort of a void- we’d been putting aside grudges and problems in the interest of their comfort, but also setting aside interests and hobbies to make time for them. How would we get along without that purpose and burden?
So, the first family Thanksgiving my family had been able to attend in a decade was arranged, part family gathering, part wake. We drove from Colorado this time, I’d been taking a semester off after a viral infection nearly killed me, and my sister taking a gap year before college. Everyone was going to be there- my mother’s brother family, My grandmother’s sister and her daughter and her husband, Sue and Cliff.
Sue never really got the hang of critical thinking and as such conservative politics and conspiracy theories held tremendous appeal to her, and that crossed with the family’s double-dominant Dramatic Hoe Genes means that she’s prone to the occasional spectacular leap of illogic and will fight you in the street to defend it.
A decade prior, she’d taken issue with how my uncle stuffed the Turkey.
Seriously, read that one it’ll make this story make a lot more sense.
Upon arrival, she seemed to have mellowed slightly in the past 11 years and we had an entire salient conversation about fishing whilst preparing the bird. It was a little strange- after the last decade, it was like I was meeting the entire family again for the first time, but things were going well and I was starting to remember things again. Maybe I’d figure out how to get back next year.
“We should establish some more traditions!” Mom suggested after Aunt Stephanie mentioned how odd it was to not have grandma and grampa around. Being raised a 5th generation agnostic has got some advantages- I’ve never gotten up before noon on a sunday- but the lack of religious structure means you’ve gotta DIY your holiday rituals sometimes. We were used to applying this to Agnosticmas already and were willing to build Thanksgiving 2.0 (now with 200% less revisionist history!) if necessary.
“Like what? Decorations?”
“Yeah, food, decorations, party games, things like that. Bobby seems game to do his Pregnant Turkey every year, so that’s one down. Now all we need is some festive decorations and a party game and we’ll have a real traditional holiday.”
“Hand turkeys?” Suggested my sister.
“We still have pumpkins we didn’t carve at Halloween, we could make a turkey out of those?” Said cousin Sam.
“Oh yeah with the decorative gourds in the hallway- the long one is the neck and- do we have corn for the tail?” I said, missing art class and feeling entirely too overconfident in my ability to handle knives. Thusly, everyone under 40 went off to the garage to create a Squash facsimile of Ohio’s Most Murderous Avian.
We were doing pretty good for most of it- there was the initial debate as to whether the mock-turkey was going to be cooked or still kicking, but that was quickly settled by the locating of a spectacularly ugly nobbly gourd to be it’s head, but then JohnJack brought up an important point:
“Are we going to be putting a candle in this like a jack-o-lantern?”
We all paused, staring at the half-gutted pumpkin we’d started disemboweling on instinct like a horde of overexcited serial killers.
“I mean, we’re definitely setting him on fire eventually.” I said like a sane and rational person that should definitely be holding an eight-inch knife. “But I think the corn leaves would catch so we probably shouldn’t do that inside. We’ll set it on fire AFTER the meal, as a sacrifice to harvest gods.”
“That sounds reasonable.” Said cousin Sam, up to her elbows in pumpkin guts like another sane and reasonable person who should be allowed to have knives.
“What are we going to call him?” Asked my sister, shovelling the rest of pumpkin guts out like the only responsible adult in the room.
“Your brother is named JohnJack because you guys named literally every dude Bob for like eight generations there, are you really going to start that up again?” Said my sister.
“Slagthor the Annihilator.” Suggested JohnJack.
“MUCH BETTER.” we all agreed, and set about the complicated technical challenge of getting his head to stay on securely enough to last through dinner.
Slagthor turned into a thing of beauty and terror- he had a resplendent tail of multicolored corn cobs and leaves, wings carved from the sides of the pumpkin and carefully offset and filled in with corn leaves, a long goose-gourd for his neck and some hideous knobbly thing for his face, the twisted stem a menacing beak. We even got him to stand with creative use of aluminum wire left on the garage workbench and another pair of drumstick-shaped gourds. The effect was completed by a pair of sunglasses balanced carefully on his stem-beak, giving him a fun, 90’s-radical kind of look. He was greeted with many oohs and Ahs and genuine surprise that none of us had lost a finger making him.
“It’s a Thanksgiving miracle!” Mom declared.
Things were feeling chill, feeling fun now, and we sat down to dinner under the watchful bespectacled gaze of Slagthor, who had been put up on the mantle as master of ceremonies. Everyone went around the table and said what they were thankful for- being able to gather, the time we had together, that the turkey didn’t catch in the smoker this year- and we sat down to what was a pleasant dining experience until about two glasses of wine in, when in the middle of an unrelated conversation on raised garden beds and rabbit control, Aunt Sue opened her mouth:
“-And Osama Bin Laden’s death was a Hoax!”
The conversation came to a sudden halt and there was a collective spiritual groan at the table, as everyone tried to avoid eye contact with her. Cousin JohnJack got up from the table in disgust.
“I saw the maps! Abbottabad is nowhere NEAR the ocean!”
Her mother, unfortunately, took the bait.
“Sue, the navy has helicopters, they don’t need to take the boat everywhere.”
“They couldn’t drive a helicopter with their flippers!” said Sue excitedly now that someone was engaging with her.
“They wouldn’t need Scuba gear in the desert Sue.” Said Uncle Bobby, taking up the fight since she wasn’t going to shut up about this.
“Why would a Seal need Scuba gear?” She said.
There was a long minute of confused silence as we tried to puzzle that out. I recused myself immediately and continued eating twice-baked potato.
“Sue…” My father said cautiously, having stumbled upon her line of reasoning. “SEAL is an acronym for Sea,Air, Land. They’re human men, not trained seals.”
“No, the navy trains animals to do things underwater, they have dolphins that find bombs!” She argued.
“That was a TV show, Sue.” he said gently. “Flipper wasn’t real.”
Sue faltered, opening and closing her mouth like a confused grouper. “It-it-!” She stammered, scrambling for another theory to satisfy herself.
“Hey can we clear up so we can set Slagthor on fire before it starts snowing?” I said, which gave everyone a nice out.
We gathered in the front yard, dressed like michelin men to ward off the late-november cold, and set Slagthor atop the stump Uncle Bobby had failed to dynamite out the year before. We gathered around as Johnjack carefully lit his tail, then watched in confusion as he sprinted back towards the house. The more mentally adept members of the family started sprinting as well.
“Why are you all standing there?” he asked from the porch.
“It’s cold and we want to be near the fire, why are you running?” Asked Aunt Stephanie.
“We’re destroying him, so-”
JohnJack was interrupted by Slagthor suddenly and violently exploding, flaming cobs of corn and miniature gourds flying in all directions and the pumpkin amplifying the sound of the roman candle inside to a deafening roar. The family scattered, taking whatever cover was available- cars, snow drifts and shrubbery alike. It took a good three minutes for Slagthor to stop exploding, reduced to a charred ring of squash and flaming pieces of produce scattered about the front lawn. In the distance, sirens began to wail.
“- SoI stuffed him full of fireworks.” He explained.
We all glared at him from our various partial covers.
“I shoulda said that earlier, right?”
“Yes JohnJack, You get to clean him up.”
And thusly, the family thanksgiving 2.0’s traditions are set: the Pregnant Turkey, The telling and defending of the wildest conspiriacies we can think of, and the creation and destruction of a produce turkey.
This year I’m planning on “The earth isn’t a ball OR flat, it’s actually shaped like a donut, with the equator on the outside and the poles in the middle. The moon is the donut hole.” and putting Slagthor the Harvest Turkey out on a float so he explodes in the lake like a particularly dramatic viking funeral.
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