Thoughts on Turkeys and This Winter’s Weather

There’s been a whole lot of talk about the weather lately—as always, around this time of year. Also as always, the weather has been weird and extreme in various parts of the country, and many of the old reliable “signs” have been a bit off—at least so far. In some places. I personally had a hint of said confusing weather this past Thanksgiving Day, when I examined, as I always do, the breast of our cooked turkey. You know the drill, I’m sure: If the breastbone is light in color, the coming winter will be mild. If it’s blue or purple, it’ll be snowy and bitter cold. (Incidentally, the turkey must not have been previously frozen.) Well, at first glance our turkey breastbone looked to be pretty light in color. Fine, I thought. We’ll have a mild winter. But as I write these words in early January, the temperature at my house this morning was 21 below zero. What happened to mild? Will it come later? I should add here that on closer examination of that Thanksgiving turkey of mine, I discovered that one end of the breastbone was dark purple. I’d never before seen a two-tone breastbone. Sorta confusing. Well, we’ve all been fooled by weather signs before. It’s not that Mother Nature doesn’t know what she has in store for us, but rather that our interpretation of her signs can be off. And then I’m going to say I think some of the so-called sayings are ridiculous. For instance, why in the world would a warm Christmas mean a cold Easter (April 16)? If a month starts with good weather, why should it go out with bad weather? Surely if an elderly person makes it through winter, it doesn’t mean he/she will survive the summer. And why should squealing pigs signal a coming blizzard? (Well, maybe that one has some validity.) I used to think that the most ridiculous old weather saying of them all was “As many days old as is the moon at the first snow, there will be that many snows before crop planting time.” To me, the age of the moon during the season’s first snowfall would be irrelevant. Some time ago, I was attempting to explain this in a talk I was giving to a women’s club in Brattleboro, Vermont, a week after an unusually early snowstorm had hit New England. It was that season’s very first snowstorm, and it happened to occur when the moon was two days old. A perfect example, I thought, of how these old numerical weather sayings simply do not work. “So you can see,” I said, “that if the old moon-age saying were to be applied to this coming winter, the storm we had last week would be the second-to-last major snowstorm we’ll have throughout the entire winter season coming up.” General laughter all around. How silly. But guess what? It was. As I reflect back on that today, I’m beginning to think about that part of last Thanksgiving’s turkey breastbone that was dark purple. There’s plenty of winter still ahead here in New England and, well, do you suppose turkeys aren’t really all that dumb? This is the February 2017 edition of Jud’s New England Journal, the rather curious monthly musings of Judson Hale, editor in chief of <em>Yankee</em> magazine, published in Dublin, New Hampshire, since September 1935, and <em>The Old Farmer’s Almanac</em>, now celebrating its 225th year.