The First Tofu Thanksgiving

"Tomorrow you're going to be the one who gets their head chopped off with an axe, plucked, stuffed, cooked and eaten!"

Once upon a time there was a little, short girl who loved everything about Thanksgiving except for two things:

First there was the gruesome song her teacher made them sing to the tune of  London Bridge is Falling Down.

Mr. Turkey, run away

Run away, run away

Mr. Turkey, run away

Or you’ll be dinner on Thanksgiving Day!

For many reasons this exercise would haunt her for the rest of her life. London Bridge was one of her favorite songs and she found these new lyrics too violent for school children. She noticed that this didn’t seem to bother her classmates; but instead of making a fuss, and risk being labeled once again as “the sensitive one,”  she sang along with everybody else.

The rest of this story will more than explain the lasting effects inflicted on her young psyche.

The second thing she didn’t love about Thanksgiving was that she was always the smallest at the Thanksgiving table. She was even smaller than the turkey!

This year had been particularly frightening. Every day for a week the cranky Mr. Turkey had been confronting her, just as she was about to do something she’d been told numerous times that good little girls shouldn’t do. On Wednesday, one day before Thanksgiving, Mr. Turkey’s words had turned threatening.

“Now that you’re bigger than me, Thanksgiving’s going to be all about YOU and not ME this year. Tomorrow you’re going to be the one who gets their head chopped off with an axe, plucked, stuffed, cooked and eaten!”

She always thought she wanted to be bigger, but she was no longer sure. She wasn’t going to tell her parents about her conversations with Mr. Turkey. They would only laugh, then pat her on the head and tell her to stop making up stories. But given that this was the day before Thanksgiving she felt she had to take some kind of action.

At first they looked at her as if they were taking her tale of horror so seriously. This pleased the little short girl. But just as she began to feel better, they burst out laughing.

“You and that big imagination. Now get on and stay out of trouble.”  Then instead of patting her on her head, as she always had in the past, her mother patted her on her backside. In reaction the little short girl looked back over her shoulder. Her parents’  laughter had slowed down an occasional hiccup, and they were giving each other an oddly sly grin.

Fast as she could, she ran to her room. She didn’t even stop in the kitchen for another one of the chocolate chip cookies her mother had been aggressively pushing on her all day. She pulled a suitcase from the top shelf of her closet and tossed in a doll, a nightgown and a teddy bear.

She ran out the front door and down the street and headed out of town. For the next 24 hours she ran. During her whole journey a new variation of that sicko turkey song ran through her head right along with her:

Little, short girl, run away

Run away, run away

Little short girl, run away

Or you’ll be dinner on Thanksgiving Day!

Finally she came upon an unfamiliar small village. She followed the smells of pumpkin pie, corn pudding and something similar to turkey, through its twisty lanes. Exhausted and starving she arrived at the home of a very nice family of elves who were close to her own size. They were about to sit down to Thanksgiving dinner. Even though she didn’t have a pointy nose or wear pointy shoes like they, it brought her a feeling of safety that some of the elf children were bigger, and some were smaller than she was.

One of the smaller children carried out a festively dressed platter featuring the strangest turkey she had ever seen . It was flat and didn’t appear to have been plucked or even beheaded. The turkey looked as if it were made out of a white gooey substance like the clay they sometimes used in art class at school.

Upon seeing the confused look on her face the mother of the family said, “Don’t worry. We didn’t kill a real turkey. It’s from our homeland. It’s a tofurkey!”

Before she left the elves, but not before the safety of the day after Thanksgiving, the family gifted her with a bag of magical seeds from their homeland. The little short girl was the first of  what would one day be known as a vegan. Every year she would be sure her family served the marvelous tofurkey alongside the traditionally doomed, Mr. Turkey.

By early in the next millennium families of mixed omnivore and vegan eating camps would be more normal than not. Each holiday season these families drive each other to some serious heavy drink and gluttony.

Of the many things we have to be thankful for this year, we can thank the little short girl that no family, to the best of our knowledge, has ever resorted to cannibalism.

For many years the little short girl would return to the village in search of the friendly tofu loving elves.  According to soy  legend were never seen again.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Postcard Friendship Friday a couple of days early!