I’ve always found stuffing a turkey to be one of those mindless tasks which allow one to be thinking while doing.
It may be just that I prefer to think of other things – root canals, shark attacks, galloping consumption – while standing at the kitchen counter with my forearm shoved into a turkey’s gut.
Whatever, this Thanksgiving Day I found myself pondering a passage from an anthropology text I had been reading.
The paragraphs dealt with rites of passage, the ceremonies performed as we move from one stage of life to another. The authors suggested that “becoming a man or a woman means finding one’s place in the social system.” It also means that “since every society is larger than the nuclear family, it becomes universally necessary to detach the individual to some degree from his family of birth.”
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It occurred to me – with my arm still inside the turkey – that one of the significant rites of passage for a woman is the cooking of her first turkey.
Think about it. As we grow up, on the holidays such as Thanksgiving and Christmas, a senior female member of the family cooks a turkey and the family gathers round.
When a woman cooks and serves her first turkey and the family gathers for the first time around her table, it is a sign that she has, in one sense, arrived. The ceremony of cooking and serving the turkey is, as it were, a seal on her new adult status.
And cooking a turkey is indeed a ceremony in its own right. A turkey dinner, after all, is not something we whip up every day. The turkey, the trimmings and the ambience of the special occasions on which the meal is served conspire to imbue a turkey dinner with a significance matched by no other meal in our culture.
The best turkey dinner I ever cooked was served in a wheat field on a cold, grey, drizzly Thanksgiving Day 11 years ago. It had been a fall much like the one we have just gone through and tempers weren’t always the best, but they improved with the eating of the Thanksgiving turkey.
We had cousins visiting, our girls were both still home and we wound up the harvest shortly after supper.
We were many times blessed.
And this Thanksgiving, with our family gathered for yet another Thanksgiving, we felt blessed again.
And I, with my arm still in the turkey, chuckled thinking what a female thing I was doing, stuffing the turkey so everyone could stuff themselves.
