Good morning and welcome to Summit Up, the world’s only daily column that’s already starting to worry about Thanksgiving dinner. Last year we bought a turkey and thawed it out for like a week, but on Turkey Day it was still a frozen cannonball of poultry – unyielding and stubbornly petrified. We popped it in the oven anyway, and cooked it at 500 degrees until late Saturday, at which point it was finally thawed out but also, oddly enough, burnt to a crisp. So charred was our bird, in fact, that we were able to walk out on the deck with it and watch in horror as a light breeze carried all that turkey ash into the trees.

It was almost as if the turkey was a close relative who’d died, been cremated and then asked us to scatter its ashes in the Rocky Mountains. After that, it only made sense to huck a can of cranberry sklarge into the trees now containing the turkey’s ashes, followed by the green beans n’onion casserole, the Stove Top stuffing, three dozen (also charred beyond recognition) baked potatoes and 17 gallons of egg nog spiked with Harvey’s Bristol Cream. Shortly thereafter, every bear in the neighborhood showed up to gorge on all of this stuff, which then enabled the hunters among us to bag a few to cook for our belated Thanksgiving dinner (just as Miles Standish did all those years ago after the First Thanksgiving took place in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War).

Sometimes, you have to improvise.

We jest, of course: Miles Standish lived during the time of the pharaohs, where he also instituted a Thanksgiving-like dinner based on ancient Egyptian fare such as boiled cat, jellied eel and Nutella pita pockets.

All of which leads us to bemoan the whole Thanksgiving thing in general. What’s the point, really, in taking in Jabba-like quantities of food just so you can sit around watching lame college football games? We’ve never done it before, but just once we’d like to bag the whole thing and just go out to dinner. There are lots of great restaurants in Summit County serving Thanksgiving dinner, so if it’s your year to forgo the horror of a whole day in the kitchen, then check it out.

And, for those of you who just don’t have the cash to prepare the big dinner or go out, keep in mind we have a great, free community dinner on Thanksgiving Day. The event is at the Silverthorne Pavilion, and we’ll have a story next week sometime with more deets.

Gotta run. Start thawin’!