What a nice story about your dad carving the bird! Thanks for writing that.
You wrote “... the way he did it so easily and expertly, often smiling and engaged in conversation with someone” resonates with me. Dad was always smiling and beaming when he was sharpening the knife at the head of the table, engaging in conversation. He made it look so effortless. I remember the sharpening process seemed to take FOREVER as we waited with eager anticipation for it to be finished and for Dad to carve off the first bit of turkey breast and skin.
“...it just made us want to watch. There was something completely oddly appealing or even magical in the way he did it that simply delighted us.” — I don’t know if it affected my sisters and mom, but that’s how I felt, too.
It was such a great male and great family tradition. My wife comes from more of a “slam, bam, thank you ma’am” family without such great traditions, so it was hard to keep it going in my own family. I am east coast and she is a native Californian and the difference between formality and informality shows in many ways.
My wife would ALWAYS sneak a slice of the skin as soon as I took it off the Weber BBQ spoiling the bird’s appearance. It didn’t matter a lot, because our dining area table was too small to carve the bird, so I’d carve it over on the kitchen counter and bring a platter of carved meat to the table. We didn’t have the formal dining room of yore where we’d have dinner at Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter. Our feasts seemed to lose a bit of magic and mystery without that formal dining room with its very formal, highly polished dining room furniture, but they were always joyous times regardless.
LOL, I had to laugh at your description of sneaking a slice of skin off the Turkey...in our family, my mother had to post a guard.
I came to feel that any outsider who came to Thanksgiving at our house would think we were roasting some kind of genetically engineered skinless turkey!!!!
Sigh. I do miss those days. There were times we had 30 or more people at Thanksgiving. Then it was six. Now four. Soon to be two. Then, if we are unlucky, only one.
Eh. As Betty Davis was rumored to have said, “Old age isn’t for sissies.”
But we still do it.