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Every November, it’s turkey-hunting season for my father. He prefers shopping carts to shot guns, but he hunts all the same.
“The meat manager at Publix says they’re going to have the biggest birds ever this year,” my father announces. Whether we’re cooking for six or sixty, he abides by one mantra: The larger the turkey, the better the feast.
The hunt kicks off my dad’s annual commitment to crafting the perfect holiday season. He has been passionate about it my entire life, but it was the fall of 1997 that solidified it. It was a year marked with as many hospital visits as supermarket runs, and as many evenings spent watching Thanksgiving cooking specials as afternoons spent pacing waiting rooms. Nan, my grandmother, was finishing her last round of chemotherapy.
One night that year, my father came home with a 36-pound Butterball. “Would you look at that thing? It’s bigger than Scooter Pie,” Nan laughed. “Scooter Pie” was the nickname she’d given my one-year-old sister, Kirsten, whose pudgy little legs caused her to scoot across the floor instead of crawl. Nan’s eyes sparkled, a sharp contrast to the indigo rings underneath them. It was one of the last nights I could remember her eyes shining so brightly. She died just a few days before Christmas.
In the 13 years since, my father has hunted relentlessly for the largest turkey he can find. Every trip to the grocery store—even if it’s just for a gallon of milk—is an opportunity to scan the frozen food section. “Candace, did you check that Tyson bird at the very bottom? No, next to the freezer-burned one. Yeah, I know they’re heavy, but that one looks huge!” he’d say. I’d go on an excavation in the deep freezer bins, shifting the boulder-like birds aside until I reached the turkey in question.
“Nope, it’s a 29-pounder.” The almost-but-not-quite-gargantuan turkeys always seemed to be 29 pounds.
“Eh, not worth our time,” Dad would reply. He’d be halfway to the endcap turkey display before I could wipe the ice crystals off my jeans. Later, with my arms crossed as Dad rummaged through the bins, I’d whine: “We won’t have more than 15 people over, max. Isn’t the 29-pounder good enough?”
“Come on. We only do this once a year. We might as well do it right,” he’d answer, never taking his eyes off the pile of shrink-wrapped poultry. It was a ritual our whole family took part in, each taking turns joining my dad’s search, talking to butchers about bird deliveries, forever seeking the One Bird That’s Borderline Emu, Perhaps Pudgy Ostrich.
Our largest turkey clocked in at 42 pounds. We already had a 38-pound whopper sitting in the freezer, but my father couldn’t let the Great White Bird slip away. The scrawnier fowl was relegated to Christmas dinner, and the 42-pounder became the stuff of legend. It was the turkey every feast would be measured against. “Sure, this bird’s big, but it’s nothing like the one in 2007,” Dad would say. It was our ultimate victory, and we had two weeks’ worth of leftovers to prove it.
Last year, we broke the 40-pound threshold once again. Kirsten, now 14 and no longer scooting, walked through the front door with a frozen turkey hoisted onto her hip. She hobbled in slowly, arms wrapped tightly around the beastly bird. “Can you believe how big this thing is? I bet it’s the same size as Carson, if he curled up into a ball,” she said, referring to our 8-year-old brother. Her eyes sparkled in a way I’d remembered from years ago. I’d never question the hunt again.
Editor’s Note: I wrote this story more than a decade ago, during a Food Writing course at NYU. We had to pitch a story about holiday traditions, and I wanted to highlight one of my favorites. One I didn’t fully understand until I got older, and now, I can’t imagine what life would be like without this simple thrill, this larger-than-life hunt and the laughs around the table as we dig in.