Thanksgiving! It’s that time of the year that we commemorate the wholesale slaughter of an indigenous North American species. The turkey! When the first Europeans crossed the Atlantic, they thought North America was near Asia and labeled turkeys ‘guinea fowl.’ Yikes, Europe. It’s amazing they didn’t call turkeys Indonesia Birds or something even more ridiculous. Europeans loved eating ‘guinea fowl’ so much they shipped the birds back through the country of Turkey and that’s how turkey fowl got their real, anglicized name.

Settlers in early North America quickly depleted the turkey’s habitat, and over the years most wild turkeys have come to live in government-funded nature sanctuaries near liquor stores.

Abraham Lincoln proclaimed Thanksgiving a holiday in 1863, and the descendants of the Europeans eat the native fowl in remembrance of the Wampanoag tribe and Mayflower pilgrims celebrating their nigh-unbreakable goodwill treaty of 1621.

The history of Thanksgiving is so wonderful it’s almost hard to believe there is a dark side to it, but there is a very dark side and it’s called salmonella. Salmonella is a bacteria and it can really mess up your digestion. Here are several tips on how to avoid illness this Thanksgiving season.

1. You can get salmonella from normal-looking eggs. You can get salmonella from lightly cooked eggs. You can get salmonella from undercooked eggs. Basically, fuck eggs.

2. Don’t lick a vat if it’s labeled Vat Full of Salmonella.

3. Salmonella is more likely to get you sick if you are old or a baby. Don’t be old or a baby.

4. Salmonella is more common in the summer. Don’t celebrate Thanksgiving in the summer. Celebrate it in November like the rest of us, Jerry.

5. Clean your knives and keep them sharp. It’s best to sit in the dim shadows of the root cellar while sharpening your knives and whistling “In the Halls of the Mountain King” very, very slowly.

6. If you are terribly ill with salmonella poisoning, you shouldn’t be the Thanksgiving cook, even if you have an apron that instructs floozies to kiss you. If you have typhoid or buboes, you should lie down.

7. Salmonella faeries are weak only against spirit magiks.

8. Human breast milk almost never has salmonella in it. It’s a reasonable substitution for salmonella-laden unpasteurized cow or goat’s milk.

9. If you touched feces, you shouldn’t have.

10. Wash old mayonnaise jars before storing your spare blood in them.