Thanksgiving Is Here

Thanksgiving is at the end of the week, and since we had a hectic close for the December issue we’re all looking forward to taking a breath here at canvas Magazine. I’m looking forward to spending some time my family and having an opportunity to examine all the things we have to be thankful for. This year our gathering will be small, but nonetheless we’ll have the traditional meal with Turkey, stuffing, and all the trimmings. However, there will be a change in the type of Turkey we’ll be eating. This year we’re having a Heritage Turkey.

If you didn’t read the article on Heritage Turkeys by Chris O’Hara in our November issue, I’d suggest you do before you buy your Turkey, if you haven’t bought one already. (You can find the article posted on this site if you don’t have a copy of the magazine.)

I’m not a big Turkey fan to begin with, and after reading this informative article I will think twice about eating traditional turkey again. Luckily my wife, Adele, took it upon herself to get a Heritage Turkey for our Thanksgiving dinner. She cares about us, and once she heard me describe what stood out most to me in the article … “If a human baby grew at the same rate as the modern factory-farmed turkey, it would weigh 1,500 pounds at 18 weeks of age” … she immediately placed the order.

Adele is vegetarian, so it while it matters to her what the rest of the family eats, she wouldn’t be eating the turkey anyway; but she must have heard the sound in my voice and seen the look on my face when I repeated this to her. It amazed me to read it and still astounds me when I think of it. I’m an overweight guy in my forties who eats more junk than I should, but it confounds me to learn the things about food, like this, that most of us are never informed about.

Today we live in a world where people are told what they want to hear by those trying to influence them, so it’s important for each of us to question, read, learn, and speak out. As I wrote this sentence, I began to think that maybe the Thanksgiving turkey is a metaphor for life. If we don’t ask for Heritage we’ll get life that’s genetically modified, lacking the true flavors that should be there. A life packaged in a nice wrapper, exclaiming the virtues of what it is supposed to be, yet falling short in what it really should be.

I hope this Thanksgiving we’ll all take a moment to think about our lives and move further toward the decision to live a “Heritage” life; it might require some extra work on our part, but I’m sure it will be well worth it.

Tom Pellicane – Publisher, canvas Magazine