Whew! Thanksgiving Day is certainly creeping up; now it is just a week from today. It seems as if I was just musing over all the harvest décor that suddenly cropped up right after the Labor Day holiday. In my daily travels, I’ve been checking out the Turkey Day decorations. They are actually few and far between. Unbelievably, there are still some Summer decorations hanging around, i.e. red, white and blue bunting and Uncle Sam paraphernalia, and psst … I really need to dish about Dracula rubbing elbows with some kitschy, hot-pink flamingos in the same front garden. Not to be outdone with that mixed-holiday décor, the next-door neighbor’s home is festooned with Santa and ALL his reindeer, his elf helpers, his Missus plus some angels and Victorian carolers thrown in for good measure.

As to Thanksgiving decorations, I’ve seen several of those inflatable turkey lawn ornaments, collapsed or otherwise, on homeowners’ front lawns in recent years. I pass one or two every day, and I’m thinking those blow-up turkeys with their humongous bright-yellow, scaly-looking feet and pilgrim hat slightly askew, look about as stuffed as you feel after the big meal on Thanksgiving Day. Collapsed, however, they resemble a massive parachute stretched across the front lawn. Sometimes, the upcoming holiday décor is more subdued with a pair of pilgrims solemnly standing side-by-side on the porch or near a cornstalk, haystack or some pumpkins.

But my all-time favorite Thanksgiving decorations are those good-looking gobblers adorning the windows of the local elementary school or front and center in someone’s living room window, for they always evoke some warm memories on a coolish morning as I stroll by. I’ll bet if you think hard enough, you can remember making “hand turkeys” when you were back in grade school. The materials and concept were pretty simple. You traced the outline of your hand onto a piece of white construction paper. Then miraculously, as you carefully crayoned inside the lines, your “fingers” turned to “feathers” and your thumb became the gobbler’s head and neck. You added a few items: a dot for an eye, a small beak, a side wing, a red wattle for authenticity and a pair of stick legs and feet (a far cry from the actual drumsticks) and voila … a masterpiece was born! After your creative juices stopped flowing, you admired your hand turkey and either pasted it onto the classroom window with white school glue, or took it home, where the little gem was proudly displayed in the front room window or on the fridge. Now, that was a hands-on project and I’m surprised to see kids are still doing this simple, but cute artwork. I would have thought our modern-day students would simply download a turkey picture from Google Images, Photoshop it a bit, then print it out on a 3D printer before presenting it to their parents. Then, of course there’s probably an app called “Talkin’ Turkey” where the parents can photograph their offspring’s treasured artwork and share it with the world on social media in the blink of an eye. I really like the old-fashioned way better.