While busy writing my book, The Children of Raven’s Reach, I took a moment to check on the status of the turkey the president was slated to pardon. He’s pardoned quite a few people already, and some of them could be classified as turkeys. Yet he has not quite beat out the last president who pardoned a lot of turkeys before he left, some of them had not yet been charged for dropping their manure on the White House or Congressional carpets.

In any case, I wanted to see where this pardoning of the turkeys came from. I found out that supposedly it started with Ronald Reagan and was canonized by the first President Bush as a tradition. Two great moments in our history!

Well, I’ve got a turkey, actually a whole flock of them running wild through my town. I wonder if the president will pardon any of them. I also wonder what happens to those turkeys who get pardoned. Do they get sent to Aruba to bask on the beach where they gobble all day and consume drinks with little umbrellas in them? Or are they hustled off to a pen somewhere, forgotten after their moment of glory with the president? Also, is the turkey pardoned a black turkey or a white one? We need to know that for the folks with their heads in the DEI bucket.

These last questions brought me to a larger question: what if a turkey, not just any turkey, but a large, somewhat verbose turkey who was the leader of a whole bunch of turkeys pardoned himself? Would that be fair? Would that be Constitutional? Well, we just had a ruling on that pardon, and it turns out that a judge says a turkey cannot pardon himself, even if he is the leader of all the turkeys in the country. We’ll see if the ruling stands.

In the meantime, I wish you all the best Thanksgiving ever. And if you see my bird ambling down the road, please pardon my turkey.