In celebration of American Thanksgiving (which I am required, by Canadian legislation, to call that holiday), I thought it would be useful to share yesterday morning’s article on turkey carving, by Julia Moskin. “A radically untraditional step makes carving a turkey easier,” she tells us, “if less spectacular.”

I started carving the white meat of the turkey at family gatherings a couple of years ago, having either proven my worth as a meat-cutter, or at least as a viable alternative to performing one of the least-forgiving parts of preparing the meal. The white meat is hot, it’s slippy, the juice can splash on your shirt, and the cutting board can occasionally just lose all friction and fly away from you, bird and all.

Plus, as the article says:

…consider the tendency in many families to start in on the house cocktail as soon as guests begin to trickle in, and the general unwillingness to put blade to bird becomes unsurprising.

“One year the turkey took a long time to cook and I went to carve it after about 13 beers,” said Maurice Landry, who lives near Lake Charles, La. “The way I remember it, I bore down to take off the leg and the whole thing went shooting off the platter and knocked over the centerpiece.”

Yeah, that’s me. I’m that guy. I have my afternoon bottle of wine and my pre-dinner bottle of wine, and then someone hands me a knife and a steaming, twenty-five pound flightless animal? There is terror to be felt. Feel it and despair.

So it makes sense to look to what the professionals do, and what Moskin explores: Don’t cut like your grandfather, at the head of the table and to the vast amusement of all; cut like a butcher, in the kitchen, and get the most meat out of the least work. She describes it as “unconventional”, but I think instead it might be just a matter of inherited training. Like parenting, turkey carving is something you learn from your parents and peers, who figured it out from their parents and the people around them, and so on — and maybe, if you’re lucky, someone got some instruction along the way.

Unlike parenting, butchery is a competitive business, occupied by trained men and women who absolutely know what they’re doing. There’s loads of clear instructions hanging around all over the place, especially the internet, but does anyone read it? Or do we all just assume that if our parents, aunts and uncles, or whatever ancestral experts did it their way, we should too?

It’s funny, because even while I read this and watched the (highly instructional) attached video, I still found myself reluctant. On the one hand, I have thirty years of witnessing the Great Ordeal transpire on my family’s kitchen counter; on the other, I have a butcher cutting apart a hot turkey with a ten-dollar knife in roughly seven minutes. It should be a no-brainer, but I almost feel like it wouldn’t be Thanksgiving without the struggle.

But, I say that now, as I get all wistful and lathered up for the holiday season. Ask me again in about thirty-five days, when I’m staring down the Christmas turkey and wondering if, for the love of Jesus, there isn’t an easier way. I think you might find tradition somewhere on the floor, amongst the wrapping paper.