As we look forward to Christmas dinner with our families, you may be surprised to learn that someone else who always enjoyed his Christmas dinner claimed to be a vegetarian. That someone was the portly G. K. Chesterton. How could that be? After all, he was anything but a slim, trim fellow. And yet by his own admission he was a vegetarian, but with this vital qualification: “between meals.”

Like many full-time vegetarians, many of whom were also full-time worriers, Chesterton could also be at least an occasional worry wart. But unlike those who practiced vegetarianism during their meals, Chesterton had a very different worry when it came to Christmas dinner. If vegetarians worried about the fate of certain animals eaten at Christmas dinner, Chesterton worried about the fate of Christmas dinners, minus hams and turkeys.

The thirty-four year old Chesterton expressed that very worry in one of his Illustrated London News essays. He began this essay by making another confession: “It’s not my business to determine what life or death might mean to a turkey.”

But something else was his business, namely the “soul of Scrooge and the body of Cratchit.” For that matter, he went on, all people, including Ebenezer Scrooge and the Cratchits, were in the same boat on an often stormy sea. And by “all” he meant vegetarians and non-vegetarians alike (including, no doubt those puckish between meal vegetarians), each of whom owed a “terrible and tragic loyalty” to one another.

And if people found themselves starving on that stormy sea? What then? Chesterton’s solution was simple and direct: catch sharks and eat them.

But what if someone aboard ship objected and insisted that no shark should be killed and eaten? What then? Chesterton again had a ready answer: charge the fellow with treason and convict him of being a traitor to mankind.

Chesterton then turned his attention to vivisection. As you might imagine, he was against cutting up conscious dogs in the name of somehow advancing science. And he was against this period, rather than only during meals, before adding that he opposed the killing of live dogs for the same reason that he favored eating dead turkeys.

Vivisection, you see, was cruel, but so was “anti-Christmas asceticism.” More than that, both cruelties upset “normal fellowship,” and both damaged “normal good feelings”—and all in the name of something that was “intellectual and fanciful, idealistic and remote.”

Even more than that, both were bent on doing something that was not just cruel, but “horrible.” The vegetarian, here defined as the “anti-Christmas humanitarian,” was determined to “ruin” Christmas dinner. He was also determined to accomplish what Chesterton deemed to be an impossible task, namely that of achieving sympathy with a turkey.

By the same token, Chesterton thought “modern humanitarians” (otherwise defined as full-time vegetarians) made a similar mistake when they insisted that vivisection and hunting were the same thing. For Chesterton, the difference between the two was at once simple and enormous.

Yes, the hunter becomes a temporary destroyer, but only in the “healthy sense by which any creature can be a destroyer.” For a moment, but only for that moment, the hunter does become another animal.

This is not so for the vivisectionist who takes an innocent creature and then subjects it to things that no one but man could possibly subject it to.

Chesterton did not deny that we are all quite capable of doing “horrid things,” especially in horrid situations. But before we do a horrid thing, he cautioned, we must be quite certain that we actually are in a horrid situation.

What did all of this have to do with Christmas dinner, Chesterton finally asked? Only that he always planned on eating large helpings of turkey on that “wonderful day.” More to the major point of it all, he would do his eating “without the slightest hint of shame or doubt”—and with the “full knowledge that eating such a dinner was the “right and good thing” to do.

Having finally found his way back to Christmas dinner, Chesterton also rediscovered Scrooge, the Cratchits, and the rest of us, all in that same boat on that same stormy sea. But now everyone was in his place at the table, including the turkey. But dead or alive, inevitably and always, the “turkey and I are like ships that pass in the night.”

To be sure, Chesterton assured his readers that he wished every turkey well, before adding that it really wasn’t possible for him to know whether or not he had actually treated the turkey very well at all. That stipulated, Chesterton vowed to do his best to avoid all “artificial tormenting” of the turkey, whether that might mean “sticking pins in him for fun or plunging knives into him for science.”

Where did actually eating a turkey for Christmas dinner fit into all of this? What did it mean? Better yet, what didn’t it mean to this soon-to-be-non-vegetarian?  For Chesterton, It certainly didn’t mean that he didn’t wish the turkey well. Nor did it mean that he was about to convert the turkey into a victim or a slave—or a “martyr in the sight of God.”

All such speculation entered a “realm of mysticism and theology” that was quite beyond G. K. Chesterton and, for that matter, all living men. While he was in this realm, Chesterton could not resist adding that it was also beyond the turkey, who was a “far more occult and awful figure than were all of the angels and archangels in heaven.”

The turkey as an occult figure? For Chesterton, this was so because God, having revealed to us an angelic world, had never bothered to tell us what a turkey means. And neither had the turkey, who was an “enigma twice over,” meaning the bird was not just a mystery to himself, but a mystery to all the rest of us.

Chesterton concluded by conceding that full-fledged vegetarians would no doubt find his line of thought “quite frustrating.” To add to their frustration, but not to his, Chesterton had no solution to offer regarding the enigma that was the turkey. Oh, he suggested, you might try to solve things by staring at a live turkey for an hour or two. But what would that accomplish? At the end of their communal time together neither man nor bird stood to benefit. What was worse, man’s only discovery would likely be a realization that the enigma that was the turkey had only intensified, rather than lessened.

All the more reason to get right down to the business of feasting on a dead turkey for Christmas dinner. And between bites you can assure your vegetarian friends that you, too, are a vegetarian—between meals.

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The featured image is a photograph of G.K Chesterton in 1909 by Ernest Herbert Mills, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. It has been brightened for clarity.

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