One month later, he came home from school with the lyrics to a Thanksgiving song they were being taught. He felt there was something wrong with what he was asked to sing. I don’t remember the exact lyrics anymore, but they went something like “grab your gun, gonna have fun, shoot em up high, shoot em down low.” No one I spoke to at the school – no other parent, no teacher, and certainly not the principal, could see anything wrong with this song. Forget about the idea that making it seem like fun to kill turkeys could be offensive to any vegetarians in the school; they didn’t even feel any cognitive dissonance at juxtaposing a zero tolerance policy that prevented pool toys from being carried onto school property with songs that rhyme “gun” with “fun.” The principal’s defense was that the song was about turkeys. Duh. I asked if he saw my son throwing rocks at birds in trees, if he would be okay with that, and he just laughed as if I were being silly and irrational.

I was grateful this year to host my own Thanksgiving for the first time since the one my hubby and I had in college 4 years ago. We weren’t veg then, but are now. We’ve been invited to spend Thanksgiving with friends every year until now and had to bring all of our own food. This year we had our first 100% vegan Thanksgiving and it was so nice! We invited two neighbor families, one is an elderly woman who’s been vegan for a long, long time. She was so excited to spend a holiday where everything was on her “Okay to Eat” list. The other family is a single dad with four kids and they were all shocked at good the food was.

Thanks for having such a great support system here on this blog. It really makes a difference in my life to know I’m not the only one!