I’m still taking your Thanksgiving horror stories over here, but I wanted to share my favorite Thanksgiving story, too. I’m sharing because a.) it’s an awesome story and b.) I totally forgot my Dad’s birthday yesterday.

My father was born is a very rural, very tiny town called Ryan, Oklahoma. Most folks in those parts were cotton or melon farmers, and honestly the most notable things about the town is that Ryan is the birthplace of the extraordinary Floyd Tillman, a pioneer of western swing and honkytonk and the one man Willie Nelson calls the Original Outlaw, as well has the hometown of Chuck Norris…

But I digress.

My grandparents weren’t well off by any means, and pretty much farmed to survive, when my grandfather wasn’t working at ginning cotton, which, I might add, is thankless, hot, grueling work. Money was always a concern, especially for a community still reeling from the Depression and the Dust Bowl days.

There was a very, very tiny 3 bed hospital in Ryan, (ironically, it became a funeral home) run by a doctor and his wife and on Thanksgiving Day, November 23rd, 1944, my grandmother gave birth to my dad in that tiny little hospital.

There was a great deal of concern on my grandfather’s part as to how they were going to pay for my father’s delivery, but it just so happened that on that very Thanksgiving Day, the hospital had another patient in one of its other beds, but the cupboards were bare. The doctor and his wife had no Thanksgiving dinner for their patients or even themselves.

So after some discussion, my grandfather and the doctor found a way to settle the bill for my father’s delivery while fixing the good doctor’s Thanksgiving dinner dilemma. My grandfather left the hospital and in short time returned with two chickens from the farm. The bill for my father’s delivery was paid in full with the two chickens, and the doctor, his wife, and their patient had, as Arlo Guthrie puts it best, ‘a Thanksgiving dinner that couldn’t be beat.’

And ever since then? We’ve always liked to say they traded two chickens for a turkey.