Deer Lease Thanksgiving

Practically every thanksgiving we spend part or all of the holiday on the deer lease. This entails a 4+ hour trip and the packing of travel trailers, motorhomes etc.(before you get any ideas, our motorhome is a little 90 model Class C in mint condition  that my hubby bought for a song)This year it also entailed our son bringing out everything needed to fry a turkey. Not only was the turkey beautiful, but it was possibly the best turkey we have ever had. This particular son went out of his way to do this for the family..pretty neat that he and his wife went to such effort for the rest of us.
We all look forward to the "lease" This year our 10 year old grandson shot his first deer. Big event for him and for us. His dad had bought him a nice rifle, they had come over to our house to sight it in...family involvement in the whole process. He made a good shot&the deer dropped practically in his tracks. Colton has been around guns and hunting since he was born. He respects the capabilities of any gun and is careful. We do not hide our guns from our children, rather we teach them about them.  Part of that teaching is not letting them handle a gun until they have reached an age where we are sure they have the abilities necessary in the use of a gun. This is much the same as letting them around our vehicles. They are around them, in them, but we do not give them the keys to drive until they have those abilities. In all activities, we SUPERVISE. We hunt and we eat what we harvest.
Often we will pass up a shot at a buck with a nice rack in favor of taking a long spike...which is not to say that we wouldn't take a trophy buck.
We use the lease year round. Getting ready for deer season, gettng ready for dove or turkey season, camping and just getting away. We have so many stories about things that happened out at the lease. One night, many years ago, we all sat up  watching a star that would get so very bright, then almost fade away...pulsing. I picked up a newspaper on our way home and found that the star was front page news in the Dallas paper, seems it was a star going SuperNova...and we had the opportunity to see it. The kids sat up with us imagining what was going on, it was a very special time. There is the story about my youngest son shooting his first turkey, another about videoing a monster buck but not shooting it....many memories have been made "out a the lease".
This may be going by the wayside like so many other things these days. Hunting has become very expensive. We are watching our dollars closely, making adjustments to income. One of those adjustments may be not retaining the deer lease, and that is a shame. The lease is more than hunting, or camping...it is a family event a retreat, a place where we show our children things that are important to us....teamwork, preparation, follow thru, support of each other, how to have a good time without electronics, how good a hot dog tastes roasted over an open flame, how not to burn a marshmallow, why we leave the land better than we found it, respect for the land and the animals that live there. There may be other ways to do this, I am pretty sure there are, but I know this: I am going to miss going out to the "lease".