Dankdag

TIL that every year at the Pieterskerk in Leiden, there is a thanksgiving service on American Thanksgiving [today, 4th Thursday in November] to commemorate the hospitality enjoyed in the city by the Pilgrims on their way to the New World. 

Since 1981, it seems that Butterball [since 2006, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Carolina Turkeys: the largest turkey-slaughterers in the States] has funded a support line for the stressed and distraught during the holiday season - Thanksgiving, חֲנֻכָּה Hanukkah, Sinterklaas, Christmas, Kwanzaa. NYT made a micro-doc for behind the scenes. Something running that long is bound to accumulate a bunch of funny-peculiar anecdotes.

"I left my turkey in a snowbank to thaw and now I can't find it" 

This gave me frisson of recognition. During grad school in Boston, I took BI 504 Mammalogy with Tom Kunz [multiprev]. An integral part of the course was The Field Trip. We piled into a minibus and drove North far into New Hampshire bear (Ursus americanus) country. On Friday evening we arrived at a remote scout camp with wooden bunk dorms and primitive 'facilities'. Before dinner, as dusk was falling, we were instructed to lay out lines of snap-traps, wherever seemed good to us, as a way of sampling what small mammals might be present in the locality. I think the course had an old-style requirement to submit skins and skulls of a certain number of species.

Overnight 20cm of snow fell which made trap recovery a bit of a problem. But I was 40 years younger then two week event horizon and had a pretty good idea where my 10 traps were [at the foot of that spruce, under that fallen log, between the two rocks] and was able to recover them all . . . the last couple only by whacking the powdered snow with a stick until the trap exploded upwards. Not everyone was so lucky /organized  and the University had to suffer some shrinkage in its trap inventory. Tom was phlegmatic about the loss "If it hadn't snowed, some of those mice might have been carried away trap-and-all by something further up the food-chain".

Kunz was grievous bodily harmed by a car in while attending a 2011 Bat Conference but lingered on more or less bed-ridden, for 9 years before being carried away by CoViD in 2020.

I'm not proud of attempting to kill small mammals for no very good purpose. I killed a lot more later in the 80s, trying to establish an ethological connexion between melanin and adrenalin. Then again, I'm not righteous about [not] eating meat. But I've never had any grá for turkey, neither during the holidays nor at any time of the year. At least half my family agree that the key part of celebratory meals is the roast potatoes: everything else (gravy, stuffing, meat, brassica, carrots) acting in support. So: