Thanksgiving Plans

For the past few years, we've gone hunting on Thanksgiving Day, and then done a big potluck Thanksgiving dinner with friends in Seeley Lake. This year, however, most of our friends have other plans, so there's no potlucking to do. It seems that everyone either has family coming in or is going elsewhere-- there aren't any young family-less folks floating around looking for a good meal.

So, I figured we had two options: either stay home and make a turkey dinner for ourselves, or say screw it and forego the pig-out tradition. We opted for the latter.

So tomorrow morning we'll get up and feed the cows, then head for the mountains, rifles in tow. (I shot a young deer the other day, but other than that, we still have several tags-- for bull elk or for either sex whitetail deer or buck mule deer. It's the last weekend of hunting season, and so it's time for us to stop being so picky. Instead of only going after elk, at this point in the season anything legal will most likely come home with us.)

Anyhow, rather than sitting around all day and pigging out, I figured it'd be much more fun and healthy to spend the day hiking around in the woods. I mean, Thanksgiving is really all about giving thanks for the blessings that you have, right? I count among my best blessings:

• the opportunity to live in a land where I'm free to choose how to spend my holidays,
• to ability wander through vast amounts of publicly-owned forested mountains
• to provide food for myself because wildlife are abundant and we still have the right to hunt and fish, like our ancestors did to provide their food for the first Thanksgiving (I mean, if they'd had an elk, I'm sure they would've chosen to eat that over a stingly ol' wild turkey!!!)

So for me, a burger and a beer when we get done for the day will be all the feast that I need to help me have a great day of giving thanks.