As God As My Witness: A Meditation on Turkeys, Birthdays, and Bad Assumptions

Thanksgiving occupies a peculiar space in the American holiday calendar—it’s the one day we’re contractually obligated to admit we’re grateful for things while simultaneously stress-eating our body weight in starches and engaging in low-level psychological warfare with relatives we haven’t seen since last Thanksgiving, when we also stress-ate our body weight in starches and engaged in low-level psychological warfare.

It’s beautiful, really.

The thing about Thanksgiving is that it’s built on contradiction. We celebrate abundance by cooking enough food to sustain a Victorian workhouse for a month, then spend the next week eating turkey sandwiches with the enthusiasm of a prisoner facing another meal of gruel. We gather to give thanks, then argue about politics, football, and whether the marshmallows on the sweet potatoes are a beloved tradition or a war crime against root vegetables.

And yet, we do it every year. We subject ourselves to the traffic, the chaos, the inevitable discovery that someone forgot to buy whipping cream and now the pumpkin pie will be served with shame and apologies. We endure Uncle Gary’s story about that time he almost bought Apple stock in 1997, Aunt Linda’s pointed questions about why we’re still single, and the kids’ table conversation that somehow always turns into a debate about which superhero would win in a fight, which is honestly more intellectually stimulating than most of what’s happening at the adults’ table.

There’s something oddly comforting about this ritual humiliation. It’s predictable. It’s shared. It’s the knowledge that somewhere, in another house, another family is having the exact same experience, except their Uncle Gary almost bought Microsoft stock and their Aunt Linda wants to know about grandchildren instead of marriage prospects.

The Thanksgiving media canon understands this perfectly.

We have “A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving,” where Charlie Brown throws together a Thanksgiving dinner consisting of toast, popcorn, pretzels, and jellybeans because he has no idea what he’s doing but feels obligated to try anyway. It’s the most relatable thing Charles Schulz ever created. Peppermint Patty shows up uninvited, complains about the menu, and everyone still sits around the table together because that’s what you do. You show up, you complain, you’re grateful anyway.

And then there’s WKRP’s “Turkeys Away” episode, which may be the single greatest Thanksgiving television moment ever committed to film. For the uninitiated: a radio station manager decides to promote the station by dropping live turkeys from a helicopter, operating under the catastrophically incorrect assumption that turkeys can fly. They cannot. Chaos ensues. “As God as my witness, I thought turkeys could fly” became an instant classic line because it captures something essential about Thanksgiving—we’re all just making our best guesses and hoping the turkeys cooperate.

They rarely do.

My own Thanksgiving history includes a complicating factor: my birthday.

It doesn’t always fall on Thanksgiving, but sometimes it does, creating a perfect storm of obligation, celebration, and the nagging feeling that people are only singing “Happy Birthday” because they’re already gathered and might as well.

Next year, it lands on Thanksgiving Day. I’ll be another year older, surrounded by family, turkey, and the knowledge that my birthday cake is competing for stomach space with three kinds of pie. It’s fine. I’ve made peace with it.

But I wasn’t always so zen about the birthday-Thanksgiving overlap.

When I was little—maybe six or seven—my birthday fell on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. So close, yet so far. I became obsessed with the idea of my birthday landing on Thanksgiving itself. I asked my parents when this magical convergence would occur. They, bless them, tried to explain the calendar to a child whose understanding of time was limited to “right now,” “soon,” and “forever from now” (anything longer than a week).

I didn’t understand their explanation about rotating days and moving dates. I just knew that if my birthday was on Wednesday this year, it would clearly be on Thursday next year. That’s how things worked. You just moved forward. Wednesday, then Thursday. Simple.

I spent that entire year waiting for my birthday to land on Thanksgiving. I dreamed about it. I planned for it. I imagined the glory of having everyone already gathered, the house already decorated (with fall leaves, but still), the festive atmosphere ready-made. I wouldn’t have to share my birthday with a random Wednesday. I’d share it with a holiday. A major one. I’d basically be co-celebrating with all of America.

Then next year came, and my birthday was… on Friday.

Friday.

I was devastated. Betrayed by the calendar itself. How could this happen? How could it skip right over Thursday? My parents tried to explain leap years and how the calendar is more complicated than I thought, but I wasn’t hearing it. I had been promised Thursday—or at least, I had promised myself Thursday—and instead I got Friday. Regular, boring, day-after-Thanksgiving Friday. The day everyone spends in a tryptophan coma or fighting strangers at Target for discounted electronics.

It was my first real encounter with the cruel indifference of time and mathematics. The universe didn’t care about my birthday-Thanksgiving dreams. The calendar was going to do whatever it wanted, and I was just along for the ride. Leap years were going to leap, dates were going to drift, and sometimes you got Thursday and sometimes you got Friday and there was nothing you could do about it.

I learned a valuable lesson that day, though it took me years to articulate it: life rarely arranges itself according to our expectations. We make plans, we build up scenarios in our heads, we assume things will progress in a neat, orderly fashion—Wednesday, then Thursday—and then reality shows up with Friday and a shrug.

Thanksgiving, in a way, embodies this truth.

We plan the perfect meal, the perfect gathering, the perfect expression of gratitude. We imagine Norman Rockwell scenes of harmonious family togetherness. Then someone burns the rolls, the dog eats the butter, Cousin Jake brings his new girlfriend who turns out to be weirdly invested in essential oils, and your sister-in-law passive-aggressively mentions that she makes her stuffing from scratch while giving your box of Stove Top a meaningful look.

And yet—and this is the remarkable part—it still works. Not because it goes according to plan, but because we show up anyway. We show up for the chaos, the disappointment, the arguments about whether gravy should have lumps (it shouldn’t, but somehow always does). We show up for the moment when someone says something genuinely funny and the whole table laughs, for the quiet satisfaction of a perfectly cooked turkey (even if the sides are a disaster), for the kids running around hyped up on pie, for the exhausted collapse on the couch afterward when someone inevitably turns on football and everyone pretends to care who’s winning.

We show up for each other, basically, even when—especially when—things don’t go according to plan.

Charlie Brown’s toast and jellybeans dinner is a disaster, but his friends show up and eat it anyway. WKRP’s turkey drop is a catastrophe of biblical proportions, but it becomes the story everyone tells for years. My birthday didn’t land on Thanksgiving when I desperately wanted it to, but I got other Thanksgivings, other birthdays, other moments that didn’t match my expectations but were pretty good anyway.

That’s the thing about Thanksgiving. It’s not about perfection. It’s about showing up. It’s about being grateful for what you have, even when what you have is Uncle Gary’s stock stories, lumpy gravy, and a birthday that landed on Friday instead of Thursday.

It’s about recognizing that turkeys can’t fly, but we invite them to dinner anyway.

So next year, we’ll gather for Thanksgiving once again, and celebrate my birthday. It’s going to happen. I checked the calendar. Twice.

And sometimes, if we’re lucky, that’s enough.