“I think you know why we’re here.” The turkey began. “Not that we had a choice.” He had dismounted his usual position on the mantle, and had been unseasonably plopped into the dusty box with the rest of them. 

“We have been here before. This isn’t the first time we have faced near calamity, and I would like you to keep this in mind as we continue our meeting.” The turkey finished. He had long been the head of their organization, and, although divergent opinions on the eligibility of his position existed, he would remain the executive officer until he split at the seams. 

“Our troubles began five years ago, when we were mistakenly put up around Halloween.” the decorative butter knife said. 

“Then, four years back, they took us down on December first, only one week after thanksgiving!” His voice rose. “And now, here we are! The morning of Friday, November, 25! We should be out in the open, celebrating thanksgiving! We’re talking less than twenty-four hours after they dumped the stuffing into a leftover container, and here we are! I think we were all appalled at how promptly we were thrown into this dusty tub, and how they all oohed and aahed over the Christmas lights! What reason do they have to insult us in this way?” He sat back with a shudder from his blunt tip to his leaf embossed handle.

“I have put together,” began the miniature scarecrow, “a helpful chart of our net success at personifying the season in relation to time.” The scarecrow put his intelligence to use as much as one could with a cerebellum composed primarily of dead grasses. “You see” He produced his chart and pointed to it, “We were staying level, with even a small spike in 2013, but ever since 2017 we have had a steady decrease in popularity. This enormous cliff here is 2020—”

 “I remember that!” the adorned napkins interrupted. “We were only put up for the ——- day of Thanksgiving. There were no people, little ——- food. Someone tried to put a ——- mask on the popsicle-stick pilgrim! No stuffing…——– the stuffing…” The napkin trailed off, muttering explicits under his breath.

“Anyway,” the scarecrow continued, “Ever since we just haven’t been able to regain the massive popularity we once had.” The scarecrow paused, and drew out another chart. “And this, this is the popularity of Christmas, as the line indicates, it goes up! Up! Up!” He banged the chart and increased his volume of every Up, until he stressed the stitches at the corners of his mouth. “This, ladies and gentleman, is our competitor. Logically speaking, if P is the total amount of effort of celebration from November to December then P=T+C where T= Thanksgiving and C= Christmas. By the law of the conservation of celebration, in order for more celebration to be attributed to thanksgiving, we must subtract that amount from Christmas. So our equation becomes P= (T+x) + (C-x) where (T+x) is the optimal amount of celebration at thanksgiving.” The scarecrow finished, looking around for comprehension. Although the scarecrow tried very hard to convey his ideas logically, they seldom spanned the knowledge gap of his audience. Even the quilted owl, who was a fairly sound economist and had extensive knowledge in the sciences of festivity, hesitated at this explanation. There was a point where the time spent understanding something outweighed the potential benefits.

“Well… um… thanks for that scarecrow.” The turkey started, “I think the point is that we must do something about Christmas.”

“Yes” Began the seasonally garbed paper cutouts, ambassador of their association, “We have received angry messages from foreign centerpieces across the country. They want to know what we will do about these unsettling events, and if we can collaborate our diplomacy. Why does Christmas get a season while we only get a dinner? Why is there a plethora of Christmas songs and we only get Turkey in the Straw? (The turkey cringed) We have had disturbing accounts of Christmas music playing in grocery stores as early as Halloween. In extreme cases, some have been found to listen to Jingle Bell Rock on loop for an hour per day, every day since July!! But this information is from the ornate candle, and candles have a way of being unreliable.”

“That is a total of six days and nine hours of unseasonal Christmas music!” The scarecrow cried in disgust.

“I think” started the vase of dead grasses, “our loss of popularity is due to the lack of respect for our holiday. This was very much clear last year when they added the jack-o’-lantern to our festivities” 

She lowered her voice, and tried to be as discreet as possible, glancing in the corner, where the jack-o’-lantern was making scary faces into the reflective surface of the silver gravy dish. She continued in a whisper.

“A jack-o’-lantern has Halloween written all over it, but no one will lose sleep over blurring the lines between ancestral spirit worship and thankfulness. However, if a skeleton crawled down your chimney, there would be a huge uproar.” She paused for breath, “Ok, let’s face it, no one really cares about a party of religious refugees in poor health, landing on a continent four hundred years ago. People don’t want to give thanks, they only want to get gifts.”

It was time for the turkey to intervene on what was sure to be an accurate, but overly prolonged, speech. “The benefits of Christmas are too much to compete with. We must either conform our holiday towards the public trends, which would be extremely difficult, or try to dampen the Christmas spirit.”

“Second!” chimed the assorted spoons, who all were only subtly different in appearances, but, as they will tell you, could not be used as anything else except for their specialized purpose. 

“We could send nasty letters to Santa Claus.” Suggested the slotted spoon, the cranberry spoon, the peach spoon, and the stuffing spoon in eerie unison. 

“Or put pressure on the ornaments!” Said the teaspoon, the dessert spoon, the cider spoon, the melon spoon, and the olive spoon.

“We could hide the Christmas lights!” Cried the side notch spoon, the mustard spoon, the rice spoon, the spaghetti spoon, the grapefruit spoon, and the jam spoon.

“Or, we could burn the Christmas tree!” shouted the pie spoon, the salad spoon, the sugar spoon, the cooking spoon, the caviar spoon, the engraved spoon, the Korean spoon, and the spork (who wasn’t really a spoon but insisted on hanging out with them anyway). 

The whole group of festivities were very worked up by now. Everyone talked at once, shouting plots of revenge on the Christmas decorations who had so successfully eclipsed them in popularity. The ceramic salt shaker farmer even ventured to proclaim that there was to be no Christmas at all, if he could help it. The turkey attempted to quiet the group. Although their intentions aligned with his, mobs had a way of degrading their level of thinking to the point of anarchy. 

“Please! Please!… Everyone! We must refocus!” Finally, after an outburst of the turkey’s gobbling, and a few hollers from the more sensible festivities, the group quieted. 

“We need organization. Our numbers are nothing compared to the horde of Christmas decorations that get restocked every year. We must devise a plan.”

“Wait,” The tablecloth shouted timidly. The table cloth, whose only attribute that related her to the rest of them was her golden brown attire and a few red and yellow tassels, had remained silent until now. She was shy, and didn’t like to argue often, unless she had something really worthwhile to say. So when she spoke, everyone listened. “We are forgetting the purpose of our holiday. Thanksgiving is for giving thanks, and enjoying what we have, not plotting to destroy those more fortunate than ourselves—”

“Whoa! Whoa-whoa!” the adorned napkins cried, “What the —— are you saying! We cannot be ——- thankful for what we have, if we haven’t got it! We have to consider our —— future!”

“Well, me and the angel at the top of the nativity were talking the other day, and—” another outburst from the napkins cut the tablecloth off.

“Talking to who?! So you think that you’re ——- better than all of us because you can rise above the prejudice that inevitably exists between our two ——- parties! Disgusting!” Although the rest of them wouldn’t have put it so strongly, murmurs were spreading through the crowd.

“No, the other day we were talking, and I realized we weren’t so different after all. We both bring happiness into the world, and even if we do it differently or for a shorter time, we should still celebrate what we have, stay true to our tradition, and make it meaningful.” 

The tablecloth’s comment was met with silence. She had played the Deep and Philosophical card, and it was a precarious argument trying to refute things like thankfulness, meaningfulness, and true to tradition. Clearly, some arguments would need careful modification.

“All of that was very nice,” The decorative butter knife started, “but times are changing. Things are very different now from how they were in 1620. We have a market to maintain, reputation to keep, popularity to regain. Things have become much more complicated than thankfulness. If it were that simple, we would just end up dancing with the elves.” 

  “Yeah,” said the vase of dead grasses, “If we let our old traditions impede our popularity and enjoyment, we will lose out on what we could have. People will become uninterested in what we offer them. No one wants to go out of their way to be thankful!… And I hope we never see the Thursday where there is no stuffing, no dinner rolls, no casserole…” she added an emotional sniff, “But all this could be avoided if we conform to what’s popular, or even better, limit the potency of Christmas.” The room readily agreed to this except for the scarecrow. And if it weren’t for him, the room would have reverted to chaos.

He coughed a dusty Ahem, “Actually, the tablecloth has a point. Please! Hear me out! We cannot become something different than we already are. If we change the conduct of this holiday, what keeps Christmas from changing theirs? What keeps us from changing more than necessary? And if we do not change our policies on thankfulness, then we cannot harass the Christmas ornaments, because it is against our policies to do so. Our foundations must stay the same. We must not lead by becoming what we are not, but by being what we are. By our example, we must personify the season and the thankfulness it entails.” 

The scarecrow sat down. The argument in the tub had stopped. Everyone thought about what they had said, and even though they didn’t like it, there was some truth there. The quilted owl was the first to agree.

“He’s right, we cannot take action against Christmas. It refutes the purpose of our holiday” After that, the festivities continued to argue, each trying to convince the others to join their side of the schism. Eventually, though, most people reluctantly agreed that the tablecloth was right. No one was ready to blaspheme their own holiday. They were all too proud of it.

“Alright,” The silver gravy dish said, “We can’t get back at Christmas, but all that thankfulness stuff still doesn’t seem necessary.” The turkey sensed another debate coming on and feared that an even more unpleasant prospect might result. Being the leader, one must be cautious not to let one’s subjects think too hard or too deep. It was better if things stayed as they were, without dissecting more of their beliefs and principles. 

“I think that settles it,” the turkey concluded. “We cannot take extreme measures to ensure our popularity and longevity. We must work hard to make people like us the way we are. And even though we must be thankful,” The turkey added, “We don’t have to be happy about it.”

 Their annual meeting concluded with most decorations thinking deeper than usual. So it was unhappily, but thankfully that they watched the star being erected at the top of the Christmas tree. It was unhappily, but thankfully that the festivities listened to Here Comes Santa Claus while the family rolled out the Christmas cookies. And it was unhappily, but thankfully that the turkey, the scarecrow, the decorative butter knife, the quilted owl, the vase of dead grasses, the paper cutouts, the gravy dish, the napkins, the assorted spoons, and tablecloth collected dust in the decorations box, waiting for next Thanksgiving. Until they would be unpacked for a day, or maybe a week, to celebrate their holiday, and their thankfulness for whatever time they were given.