I loved drawing hand turkeys when I was a kid. They’re so wonderfully simple to make:
Step 1) Place your hand on a piece of paper.
Step 2) Use a crayon or marker to outline your hand.
Step 3) Add a beak, a wing, and two legs to your hand outline.
Step 4) Decorate the “fingers” in your outline like colorful feathers.
Step 5) Display your Hand Turkey proudly on the fridge!
I wish I’d kept all my childhood hand turkeys. It’d be fun to look back on how my hand grew over the years, as well as how my art turkey tastes changed. I’m pretty sure any turkey I drew in the 70s would have had a definite Star Wars flair:
I didn’t draw this badass Sith hand turkey. But I wish I had. I do remember adding little Pilgrim hats to my hand turkeys. Which, now that I think about it, is a little morbid. It’s like I was celebrating the turkey, but also making it crystal-clear I wanted it dead.
Nobody really knows when the first hand turkey was made. But archaeologists recently discovered neanderthal cave paintings from over 40,000 years ago that I believe are the earliest efforts at mastering the hand turkey.
Another great thing about hand turkeys is there’s no right or wrong way to make one. You can draw them, paint them, sculpt them, bake them, knit them, recycle them out of old clothes, tattoo them, and even make them out of fall leaves.
I was a hand turkey purist who preferred the simple crayon version…
But some people prefer a realistic hand turkey…
There’s puppet hand turkeys…
Rubber glove hand turkeys…
And of course creepy hand turkeys…
Which got me thinking… What other body part turkeys are out there? Well, apparently there are foot turkeys, too. And while I stan the original Hand Turkey, I do appreciate that you can make a foot turkey this way…
Or this way…
And of course, because this is Gleek, I couldn’t help but google “dick turkey.”
I chose a charming dick turkey for this post because it’s Thanksgiving, and Thanksgiving should be family-friendly. Also, I think that may be the first time I’ve ever used “charming dick turkey” in a sentence. And for that, I’m truly thankful.