Turkey day

Thanksgiving is by far my favourite holiday. Free from the religious or patriotic claptrap that engulf most American holidays,, it is just about eating, drinking and making merry. Like any fun holiday, it is almost pagan, despite being only made a national holiday in the 1930s by FDR to help folks forget about the Great Depression (it has always been a holiday in Massachusetts).

There are some folk who are not so wild about it. A day that commemorates the Pilgrim's first sucessful harvest - and by implication clearing the way for more white settlers - is not celebrated so much in the Native American community. I'm fact, Native American protesters usually go down to Plymouth Rock each Thanksgiving to throw blood on it. I don't know whose blood it is, actually. A slaughtered whitey, one hopes.

Yet where am I spending the day? In the bosom of family and friends stuffing my face with pumpkin pie until immobile? No I am on a train to Edinburgh called the Highland Chieftan eating a Marks & Spencer Mexican three bean wrap and some Kettle Chips. It is the first Thanksgiving I've not celebrated since I've been abroad. Usually I whip up my famous nut roast (secret ingredient: grated green apple. And semen. Not my semen, mind). My vegetarianism has waxed and waned over the years, but one thing that turned me was cooking my first (and only) turkey and having to remove the euphemistically named gibblets. Gibblets sound like a children's board game. What I discovered was that they are the poor beast's internal organs. Incidentally, Benjamin Franklin propsed the wild turkey as the US national bird. Would American history have been different if we adopted the comical, ungainly and skittish turkey as our national symbol rather than the war-like bald eagle? Discuss.