Grandfather and Grandmother Hamil each year gave quite a Christmas Party for fifteen or twenty members of the family, including two cousins about my age. The big doings each year for us boys was getting the turkey gobblers drunk. Grandfather usually kept for breeding five or six hen turkeys and a couple of gobblers.
Each of us three boys would get some whiskey before Christmas and soak corn in it for a few days and also bring some in a bottle and soak bread in it. We would drive the gobblers to the orchard back of the barn and feed the bread and corn to them. It took about an hour for the gobblers to commence the show. Their red faces would get very red, they would sit on their tail feathers and gobble and stagger around with their wings spread out sweeping the ground, much to our amusement. We were careful not to let the girls or older members of the family in on our entertainment for fear they would not approve of it and might question us as to the source of the whiskey.