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While many have spent the last few days thawing out a store-bought turkey in preparation for their Thanksgiving meal, a Nikiski couple -- James and Julie Arness -- have spent the last few months getting two birds ready for their family feast.

"We've never done anything like this before," James said. "The whole thing was my wife's idea."

The couple raised two turkeys they obtained back in May from Cad-Re Feed in Soldotna. Julie said she made the decision to raise her own turkeys in an attempt to eat healthier and live more sustainably.

"I was the instigator," she said. "I wanted to know where my food was coming from, and know it had lived a good life before it ended up on the dinner table."

The couple obtained the birds as tiny poults, along with several small chicks they intended to raise as egg layers.

"They were adorable when tiny," Julie said.

"They'd fit in the palm of your hand," James added. "We raised them all together in the bathtub, until they started getting bigger and making a racket."

The couple moved the birds to a larger pen in the garage where the fowl lived with the family dogs, until they outgrew this area, too. Then all the birds were moved outside to a one coop, and eventually another as the turkeys grew quite large.

"They grew like wildfire," James said. "My wife provided constant food and they had constant grazing."

"I fed them a high-quality poultry feed, and gave them all of our kitchen waste that wasn't poultry related -- everything from broccoli, to beef and salmon," Julie said. As the months past, the birds that began their life as two small, fuzzy creatures, had grown into to large, majestic turkeys with red heads with huge wattles, and dark, iridescent feathers hiding the massive breasts that laid beneath.

"We thought they would be mostly feathers and not much meat," James said "But when we went to butcher them, that's when we started to suspect they had more meat to them than we initially thought."

The couple had read a method for slaughtering turkeys that entailed throwing a rope over a tree branch, then tying the other end around the birds legs, so that the fowl can be hoisted upside-down. James said this is done to keep the birds calmer when killed, and the inversion allows them to bleed out quickly.

"We had the rope on his feet and everything else in place," James said. "But we had a friend helping us who weighed 120 pounds and she couldn't lift him."

The couple and their friend quickly regrouped and were able to dispatch the turkeys. However, after spending several months raising the birds, and even naming them, it was a slightly tougher task than they had envisioned.

"There were some tears," James said. "My wife was pretty broken up about it initially. The plan had been to give them Thanksgiving-themed names -- John Smith and Pocahontas -- to make it easier, but it didn't help. Next time we'll have to call them Dinner and Leftovers."

Julie confirmed that it was emotionally difficult to slaughter the birds, but rather than dwelling on her sorrow, she said she focused more on the soon-to-come meal.

"The day we butchered them, I let them out of the pen and called them, and they ran to me, so it was a little sad and a little challenging," she said. "But I'm counting on this being the most delicious turkey I've ever eaten."

Of course, the couple must now contend with how to cook a turkey as large as they raised.

"Gutted, feathered and ready to go in the oven, John Smith weighed 52 pounds and Pocahontas weighed 36 pounds," James said. "Cooking it at 20 minutes per pound, I guess we'll have to put this thing in a 4 a.m. and cook it for about 16 to 17 hours, if we can fit it in the oven."

After John Smith is cooked -- Pocahontas will be saved for Christmas, James said rather than carving it in the kitchen and bringing the meat to the table as he typically does, he intends to bring to whole bird out "Norman Rockwell style" so that his family and guests can ooh and ahh the cooked turkey.

"We did the math and figured we'll have more than 100 servings of turkey," Julie said. "So we invited 25 people and told the all to bring Tupperware so they could take home leftovers."

As to if they would recommend to others the experience of raising a turkey or turkeys for Thanksgiving, the couple said absolutely.

"We had no idea what we were doing," Julie said. "We just got books and learned as we went. It wasn't hard. Anybody could do it and more people should be willing to give it a try."

Joseph Robertia can be reached at joseph.robertia@peninsulaclarion.com.