Turkey with stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, cranberry sauce and vegetables is the traditional Christmas dinner in the United States. Americans are said to consume an estimated 22 million turkeys on Christmas. In addition, roast beef and ham are quite common. In Germany, it is goose, duck or turkey on Christmas Day and potato salad with Wieners on Christmas Eve. When I was a child, goose was the feast of choice on Christmas Day, but because turkey meat tends to be leaner than duck or goose, turkeys are increasing in popularity at the Christmas dinner table.

Traditional Turkey Dinner

Where did the turkey originate?

The turkey is a native to the Americas and classed in the family of Phasianidae (pheasants, partridges, grouse and others). Long before Christopher Columbus sailed to the New World, Native Americans were already domesticating turkeys. Research indicates that the birds were already domesticated in south-central Mexico at around 800 B.C. and in the southwestern U.S. at about 200 B.C. The Aztecs called the bird huexolotl and raised turkeys not for their meat but for their feathers, which were used in rituals and ceremonies.

How did the bird become known as “turkey?”

Christopher Columbus, or possibly the Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortes, brought the turkey from the New World to Europe. Since Columbus had sown the seeds of geographic confusion with his assessment that the New World was India, Europeans tended to name the bird after its alleged country of origin. Therefore, the French called it coq d’Inde (rooster of India); in Arabia, the turkey became known as the Ethiopian bird; in Lebanon it was called Abyssinian cock; the Portuguese named it Peru bird; the Greeks settled on galopoula (French bird – presumably, the Greeks got their first birds from the French); and the Germans called it Truthahn (male), Truthenne (female) or Puter (male) or Pute (female) – an anglicized version of “turkey.”

Then how did the English-speaking world end up calling the North American bird “turkey” when everyone else was heading off in the direction of India, Peru, or Ethiopia? As the story goes, Native Americans were calling the bird “toka” based on its vocalizations that sounded like “tok tok.” When the Spaniards arrived, they changed “toka” into “tukki.” Many decades later when the conquerors of the Americas became known as Americans, the “tukki” became known as the “turkey.” (see also Christmas Time in Berlin, Christmas Tree Tradition is German, and Christmas Calendar and Advent Wreath.

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Walled-In is my story of growing up in Berlin during the Cold War. Juxtaposing the events that engulfed Berlin during the Berlin Blockade, the Berlin Airlift, the Berlin Wall and Kennedy’s Berlin visit with the struggle against my equally insurmountable parental walls, Walled-In is about freedom vs. conformity, conflict vs. harmony, domination vs. submission, loyalty vs. betrayal.