My mom’s home-baked turkey is one of our longest-running Christmas traditions – it isn’t always the best-tasting, and it’s occasionally dry, but it’s certainly one of the things we look forward to each year.

We normally get a ginormous one at the supermarket, and end up eating nothing but leftovers for the rest of the year. Believe me, you haven’t lived til you’ve tried Turkey Tinola. It’s things like that that make you feel like a king.

This year however, our former-cook-turned-haciendera came over to visit, and left us with this memorable live specimen as a gift from her farm.

It was an entertaining addition to our little backyard animal menagerie. But history has proven that if you’re an animal, you will come to an inglorious end in the D’Joya household. An old puppy once fried itself by nibbling on the electrical wires of our garden lights. A pair of bunny rabbits had their noses rot and fall off. A chick got bounced on by a basketball in the midst of a dribbling exhibition by my little brother JB. And we once had 17 hamsters escape into the backyard, only to get brutally chased down and eaten alive by our pack of dogs. Well, 16 of them did – the last one panicked and charged into the swimming pool to escape, only to remember too late it had never learned how to swim.

These are just the more recent ones.

It’s not a good thing to be an animal and belong to us. We love them, but they do not have great careers here.

So despite the love, adoration, and emotional attachment we had placed into our resident pet turkey, it had to go.

I don’t know if this was PETA-friendly, but turkeys do live to be eaten for Christmas anyway, right? At the very least it was semi-drugged and not at all violent as it awaited its decapitation on the chopping block. If only our driver had better aim and possibly a more finely-sharpened knife, its end would have slightly more glamorous.

I still think a sledgehammer or a steel chair would have created a more bloggable moment, but there were tiny little things like edibility and food styling that had to be considered.

Goodbye Turkey. We liked you a lot and will always carry you in our hearts and in our stomachs.