19 Dec 2019
In a second seasonal offering, Jane Davidson turns her attention to the frozen turkey – the symbol of all that is wrong with yuletide celebrations.
Jane Davidson
Job Title
“It’s for the staff,” she said, as she proffered it in a slightly open plastic cover. Attempts had been made to defrost it, but only part of the legs looked anything other than eskimo-like. Image: © photosiber / Adobe Stock
Christmas blog number two, and what is there left to consider after the chocolates of last time? Well, this is going to focus on the issues around turkeys.
Huge, frozen turkeys – the symbol of all that is wrong with the festive season. A species defined by a single day.
As I write this, thousands of turkeys are being hatched ready for Christmas 2019, yet many more are already in freezers awaiting purchase – or, for the super-organised, already purchased and in their freezer at home.
The un-defrosted huge festive turkey trope is a standard one for sitcoms and jokes, but what actually happens if it gets to Christmas morning and you realise your turkey isn’t ready for your consumption? Well, I’d like to share with you what happened to one such poor bird… and the turkey! (I am available for sitcom writing).
It’s Christmas morning and you’re at work – a situation that has advantages and disadvantages. Of all the festive days to work, 25 December is usually the quietest, as everyone else is too busy for anything other than a “real” emergency to tear them away from their festivities. It’s also a good day to plan some nice food for your team – and this is what would happen when I worked Christmases at one particular large hospital.
The vet would take charge of the cooking while the nursing team organised the hospital and treated the inpatients. As we didn’t have an oven large enough (or a shift long enough) to cook a turkey for 10+ people, we chose a dish we all wanted and each provided ingredients. I think the year in question we had a veggie lasagne – and it was fabulous.
Working a Christmas Day in a large hospital has highs and lows; we had some clients arrive as usual to allow us to medicate their pets as part of a palliative care programme. They sometimes joined us for lunch, too, and it felt great to be part of a great veterinary family.
The lows included the sickly new puppies and kittens brought in, and also the elderly pets kept to have “one last Christmas” with owners when they really should have been laid to rest well before Christmas Day.
When the doorbell rings out around the hospital, sounding nothing like sleigh bells, at around 11am, my heart does do a little drop. It’s not going to be the postman, and it’s unlikely to be someone donating food or blankets today. So, which emergency will it be? Pyo, GDV, puppy – or worse?
Well, it’s a patient I can tell, on first sight, that I know we can’t save. Don’t worry, I’m not diagnosing here, I’m stating the obvious – the doorbell ringer was a lady with a monstrous frozen turkey. She knew it was a turkey, and that it was still frozen, and she didn’t want us to revive it.
“It’s for the staff,” she said, as she proffered it in a slightly open plastic cover. Attempts had been made to defrost it, but only part of the legs looked anything other than eskimo-like. Protestations were made by us that we didn’t have an oven big enough to cook it, but the lady was not leaving with her turkey, so we accepted it and then had to decide what to do.
It was clearly going to take at least 24 hours to defrost, so it wasn’t for eating today, and it needed to be kept safe and vaguely hygienic until then. With a small kitchen space, it was going to be tough, so we decided to check over really how big it was under the flapping bag.
Then we saw it: cat teeth marks – four canines and a bit of incisor action on the left turkey breast, conveniently hidden beneath the wrapping round the turkey.
Charitable acts can seem kind, but really? You felt that the nicest thing to give animal charity staff working on Christmas Day was your cat’s used, second hand, obvious wear-and-tear poultry lollipop?
If it was good enough for us to eat, it was good enough for you to eat, but turkey is only for 25 December, so you couldn’t have kept it and eaten it, or shared it with neighbours – it’s not what Jesus would have wanted. Whoever heard of cooking a turkey on 26 December? Clearly not these people.
Well, we weren’t going to eat the turkey popsicle, and it wasn’t for our patients, either. We then faced the dilemma of what to do with it.
Waste deliveries wouldn’t move for a few days, and a large festering turkey wasn’t going to like sitting around in a bin bag, so we did the only thing we could.
We sent it for cremation. Communal, obviously, but a respectful end to a poor animal destined to have popularity for one very short day per year.
