Lettin' The Turkey Slide

Being the unconventional sort - I do holidays just a tad different than most. I'm not a big fan of turkey....I'm a white meat kind of girl... Which means that if I cook a turkey I'm usually left with this ginormous picked carcass with 2 big drumsticks still attached - wings and all the other unattractive items.
Then I never know what to do with it. I can't give it to my dogs - poultry bones are a bit dangerous - I know this from spending several hours in emergency animal clinics from ingestion of chicken bones, etc.
For my use - turkeys seem wasteful so I let them slide. If I do fowl on holidays I do hens which are more manageable in loads of ways. The sight of one of my grandchildren gnawing on a chicken leg is more appealing than viewing them hidden behind a big old turkey drumstick (shades of King Henry VIII)!
Lately my Thanksgiving meals have been centered around pork tenderloin. I confess to having a not so secret love affair with pork in general. I can do tenderloin in crock pots leaving my oven available for more important items like sweet potatoes......and pie. Plus there is not one single human in my family that does not like tenderloin (of course what's not to like?)
Yesterday I had prepared 6 pretty good sized tenderloins and made it home with roughly 6 pieces. Beshears is obviously synonymous for carnivore.
I also baked 3 hens and those disappeared as well. Their little carcasses were picked clean and easily disposed of leaving behind some good foundational work for chicken and dumplings. I had to have poultry of some form because one of my daughters loves giblet gravy and I would hate to disappoint her especially now that she is carrying my 12th grandchild.
Our time together yesterday was great - our little hostess Kaylee provided us with something we have never been able to do - sit down all together and eat as a family. There are so many of us and my house is so small that we wind up perched on chair arms balancing plates in our lap. So it was nice to be able to eat like civilized folk while ripping through all that grub. It was a beautiful day - allowing our little ones to enjoy the tether ball, trampoline and wide open spaces.
There was football, good wine, happy talk, smiling faces and joy in being together. Our only dark cloud was that our oldest grandson wasn't there. Having graduated from high school he now has joined the ranks of the gainfully employed and therefore misses a lot of our group activities. But we know he is aware that we missed him and were thinking of him. His mom took him a huge plate of tenderloin which is his favorite so I know that he today is a happy fellow.
We have much to be thankful for this year. It has been a rough year for most of us. We have lost people, but we've gained people as well. The circle of life continues and we remain hopeful and thankful for what we have.
I'm pretty sure the lowly turkey will continue to slide further and further down on our dinner menu until it disappears forever while the great pig climbs upward. Besides I can think of lots more to do with left over pork than left over turkey. So just as in "turkey bowling" I'm lettin' the turkey slide.