Walking into my parents’ living room, the usual welcoming chaos suddenly ground to a stunned halt.
Everyone was at home – my brother, sister, dog, and parents – but they all seemed collectively surprised at my arrival. Though perhaps that had more to do with my guests than me.
Because I’d just ushered two white-feathered turkeys across the threshold and it seemed no one knew quite how to react.
This idea had started as a joke: every Christmas, my vegetarian mum would complain about cooking meat for the family when she doesn’t ‘touch the stuff’, and as nobody else seemed keen to take the job on, I thought there had to be a way to lighten the mood.
That’s why, last year, I decided to buy two live turkeys and release them into the house on Christmas Day. Between mum’s hatred of cooking turkey and everyone else’s obsession with eating it, the prank had the potential to wind the whole family up at once.
Fortunately, my parents live on a smallholding and already have a flock of geese and chickens, so my new friends would fit right in among the flock – or so we thought.
For around two months, I gleefully concocted a plan, scouring adverts online for turkeys nearby (most of which had morbid lines about on-track fattening for Christmas). I eventually found a farmer in Halifax and agreed to pay £32 in cash.
There was just one small detail I’d overlooked: the obvious fact that these birds would usually be ‘processed’ a lot earlier than Christmas.
So, with nowhere else to keep them, my family received their present a little early. On a wintry Sunday in mid-December, I knocked on my parents’ front door and yelled ‘Surprise!’.
Under the twinkling fairylights, my family stared between me and the bedraggled-looking birds in both bewilderment and stunned silence, each of them processing the uninvited guests on their own timelines.
Eventually, my mum stuttered: ‘Oh my God.’
And then, as if on cue, one bird let out a gobble, which pushed everyone into hysterics.
As the turkeys began padding around and making themselves at home, talk turned to naming them.
My 17-year-old brother thoughtfully suggested we call them Mistle and Toe – an idea that my 22-year-old sister quickly branded ‘ridiculous’.
Once the turkeys were allowed to roam, every evening became a HIIT session: ducking, dodging, and lunging as the birds darted (and face-planted) across the garden.
Their routine only improved when my dad introduced their ‘second dinner’. Swayed by their stomachs, the turkeys began happily returning to their coop, with two caveats: they can’t navigate the stepped entrance, and they can’t always remember where it is.
Come nightfall, they sometimes squat in the grass, waiting to be found, carried, and tucked into bed with a treat. It’s a bratty existence, and if one day, someone forgets, the local fox will be delighted.
What they lack in coordination and survival skills, they surprisingly compensate for in emotional intelligence and will often waddle away from the food, instead crooning at our feet for a scratch and quick conversation.
Unsurprisingly then, it wasn’t long before my aggressively carnivorous dad had announced that, under no circumstances, was turkey to be served this Christmas.
‘Obviously,’ my brother retorted. Even my sister, who had casually started introducing the turkeys to her friends, added that the concept was too sadistic. And so that’s been that.
Much to mum’s delight, and Carol and Ivy’s too, turkey is firmly off the menu for the resident meat-eaters in our house now.
Chicken is now the meat du jour on Christmas day – which I admit smacks of favouritism – but given that domestic turkeys can live a decade, it looks like that won’t be changing any time soon.
