Gobble, gobble.

Like most of the other 60 billion pounds of people in America, we treat ourselves to a proper gorgement every Christmas. After all, it's only appropriate that our profligate spending be reflected in our dining habits. Otherwise, the whole Orgy Of Holiday Seasonal Activities would seem unbalanced. In for a penny, in for a pound, as they say, then multiply that by the exponentially-increasing number of pennies and pounds.

So it comes to pass that on Christmas night, the three of us - me, The Lovely Mrs. byoolin's trebuchet, and She Who Will Put Us In A Home (formerly known as The Kid) - sit down to a dinner that can't be beat. (Not only can it not be beat, it's never even been tied, and we've frankly given up any hope of even being considered to be in the same league. But I digress.)

There's always turkey and stuffing and gravy and sweet potatoes and some kind of other vegetable and there's usually mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce and Yorkshire pudding or homemade bread.

And when we have Christmas at home, there's just the three of us, so there's always leftovers. There's only so much of a ten- or twelve- or fifteen-pound turkey and its accompaniments that three people can eat at one sitting. While I can take some small comfort knowing that evolution will probably provide our distant descendants with (a) accordion-like stomachs which expand to accommodate enormous holiday meals or (b) fewer nerve endings between the ribs and pelvis to leave them blissfully unaware of their distension, it doesn't help our present situation. For that, we undo our belts, push away from the table and await dessert.

[Permit me another digression: having read the previous four paragraphs, I can't say I am surprised that people in the Third World might hate us.]

Anyway, as I was saying, there's only so much we can finish off at the first go. Leftovers abound. There are usually big bowls of stuffing, of gravy, of starchy tubers, and somewhere between sixty and eighty percent of an uneaten turkey left behind. Into the fridge and freezer they all go, to be picked over for the next two or three weeks, to be made into sandwiches and chili and hash browns and expanded midriffs.

But I've always thrown away the carcass of the bird and (usually) within hours remembered that I'd wanted to use it to make soup. Then I'd spend a little time cursing myself for forgetting and a little time cursing my family for wanting nothing to do with retrieved-from-the-garbage turkey soup.

This year, though, I remembered my soup plan before pitching the bird and saved the carcass. And today I made my first-ever turkey soup. I found a recipe at Allrecipes.com for After-Thanksgiving Turkey Soup (I know), secured the necessary ingredients (encountering as I did so an unprecedented shortage of half-and-half in the city's grocery and convenience stores which nearly forced me to use pumpkin spice flavoured coffee whitener in its stead) and set to work.

I tweaked the recipe a bit - less butter (I mean, who really needs a cup of it?), more of just about everything else to accommodate the extra broth I ended up with, and a couple of hours later, ta-da! Turkey soup. And pretty tasty, too.

But here's the thing: now, in addition to the big bowls of stuffing and gravy and eight pounds of leftover turkey, I've got six quarts of soup. It's really good, but it's six quarts.

So when New Year's Day comes and She Who Will Put Us In A Home begins 2010 as a vegetarian, I'll merely be in Week Two of The Year Of Eating Leftover Turkey-Based Products.