With Halloween jack-o'-lanterns starting to mold and my 5-year-old's "cool-looking" leaf collection growing, all signs point to us being on the mudslide toward the holidays.

In our house, we're already talking turkey — and, as it turns out, tofurkey, too.

My older son has the softest heart of anyone I've ever met, and he asked a few weeks ago if we were going to have a Thanksgiving turkey.

"Yeah," I said, "We have one every year."

His face crumpled.

"I don't want anyone to eat a turkey," he said. "They're cute."

I wanted to counter that turkeys are anything but "cute."

I wanted to say that they look like overfed chickens with testicles coming out of their throats, and that they're probably Mother Nature's ugliest bird — scraggly and truculent, with the hideous warble of a lonely fishwife — but because I didn't want to make him cry any harder than he already was crying, I refrained.

My kid seems to be a budding vegetarian, which terrifies me for many reasons but chiefly because the list of acceptable food items he eats is already very small and limited mostly to chicken nuggets, rice and buttered noodles.

When he was younger, he asked me about his chicken nuggets:

"Do we kill the chicken in the nuggets?"

"No," I said firmly, "we do not. It's already dead when we get it."

For a while, I allowed him to labor under the delusion that the manufacturers of chicken nuggets were waiting for elderly chickens to expire of natural causes before gently taking them from their deathbeds and turning their meat into dinosaur shapes.

He eventually caught on to my hairsplitting, and that understanding certainly hasn't increased his appetite for chicken.

But the turkey thing is different, even worse. He's seen the turkey on the Thanksgiving table, and it isn't shaped like a dinosaur. It looks like what it is, which is a turkey with its head and feet cut off, the feathers ripped from its body.

I said that this year, I'd make a tofurkey for him, which intrigued him for a while, and in what I felt was an admirable sacrifice, even offered to eat the tofurkey with him. (Another way I know he's headed for vegetarianism is that he doesn't shudder in disgust at the sound of the word "tofurkey.")

But that wasn't far enough for him.

"I want everyone to eat the tofurkey," he said. "No one can eat the turkey."

I shook my head.

"I know you think eating turkeys is wrong," I said, "but most people don't. And we can't make other people agree with us by forcing them. The best thing to do is to be a good example, and if someone asks us why we're eating tofurkey, to tell them it's because we don't want to hurt any turkeys."

My son didn't seem sold. He wanted me, as the Thanksgiving cook, to make a rule: No more turkeys.

"Killing turkeys is bad."

But as firm as he stood, I'm standing firmer.

It's time to teach him a lesson too many in our country have never learned, that morality is not universal, and that personal ethics cannot be imposed by fiat.

He believes that it's morally wrong to kill turkeys, and even though I don't agree with him, I respect his belief. I'm trying to teach him, by my example, how to show that respect, even in disagreement.

It's a complex idea. There's no clear line between immoral and a difference of opinion. There are some things we know are always wrong and other things we suspect might sometimes be wrong and beyond that, a vast gray area where good people can and often do disagree.

Navigating that gray area is tricky. Sometimes we don't even know when we're in it.

But if we're ever to achieve any kind of peace in our society, if we're ever to overcome the ocean of hatred that divides us, we must try.

So, as the parent of members of the next generation, I try.

And at our Thanksgiving, both tofurkey and turkey will coexist on the same family table.

Wish us luck.

To learn more about Georgia Garvey, visit GeorgiaGarvey.com.

Photo credit: Claudio Schwarz at Unsplash