Turkey Day

As a children’s librarian, I am obligated to celebrate the major holidays. For storytime today, I chose the rite-of-passage craft of making hand-turkeys. I’m sure I don’t even need to explain what they are, for everyone knows.

I’ll show you anyway, because it’s so quintessentially American:

I’m not a big theme-girl, so I’ve never tried to craft a storytime theme all about bears, or about flowers, or whatever. Today, though, I felt the need to present a Thanksgiving-related series of stories. As I crouched near the Thanksgiving books, looking for age-appropriate stories, I realized that at least half of the stories were about turkeys. In every single book, the point of the story was that the assumption would be that the turkey would be eaten, and in the end, it would not. I don’t know if this is a common theme because it’s an early lesson in plot twists, or because secretly all children’s authors are vegetarian.

I could have easily made the theme of this week’s storytime “Where Meat Comes From”, and open the eyes of those three-year-olds who don’t realize that turkey is made out of turkeys. I chose not to. That’s not my fight. Not this time.