This Thanksgiving, like every other, found my friends and family coming together to give thanks and share in the holiday spirit. We each ate a large meal, drank seven gallons of eggnog, and then spent a number of hours sleeping it all off. When everyone was awake, we all went out to see "Harry Potter And The Uncle Who Liked To Give Long Hugs." It was a time of peace and warmth.

It was also a time of turkey.

Admittedly, the turkey is my favorite part of the proverbial Thanksgiving feast, though I am also quite a sucker for the neighboring cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, and Clorox bleach.

It seemed to me that this year's bird was not very good. The turkey's golden brown finish appeared to have been achieved secretly, by some means involving a large amount of cheap shellac, rather than as a result of proper roasting. Although I'm not really sure who is to blame for this-either the turkey-people or Grandma-I am sure that nobody really knows anything about turkeys.

Everyone knows how to make mashed potatoes correctly.

Everyone knows how to accurately slop the cranberry sauce, ensuring that it retains the shape it had inside the can, into the bowl. And, everyone knows that a second cup of Clorox bleach not only makes whites whiter, but holidays brighter, and a hell of a lot more interesting.

But nobody knows how to cook the f--king turkey.

It happens every holiday. A wide range of my relatives, with varying degrees of both culinary achievement and intoxication, will all stand around staring at the turkey in the oven as if it's on release from the Smithsonian. After a while, Uncle Ned will ask,

"Uh, you think it's done?" Then Aunt Emma will answer,

"I don't know, Hon, what do you think?"

This cycle then repeats for several minutes until one of them finally decides that the turkey is in fact done, or somebody's whiskey runs out. It's usually a crapshoot.

Amazingly, my relatives are not the only ones confused by this procedure. There are actually thousands of Americans, not unlike Ned and Emma, who have IQs of more than 70, but who still, for some reason, cannot understand any part of cooking the holiday turkey.

So who does know how to cook the holiday turkey?

Butterball.

Every holiday season, Butterball opens a Turkey Talk Line. Waiting on the other end of 1-800-BUTTERBALL are 45 home economists and dietitians trained to dish out advice when it comes to preparing, carving, and thawing the turkey. These patient operators hear from over 100,000 callers every holiday season. That's 100,000 people who don't know how the f--k to cook the turkey.

If only they had heard from Uncle Ned and Aunt Emma.

Some of the more frequently asked questions are "What's the best way to thaw a turkey?" "How do you recommend safely handling the turkey?" "How do you stuff the turkey?" and, "Where does the meat thermometer go?" It is worth noting that half these questions resemble bawdy high-school humor.

Nevertheless, the folks at Butterball maintain a wonderful website, www.butterball.com, where they have the appropriate and rather sexual diagrams that do explain ‘where the meat thermometer goes.'

And it's a good thing they do, because if they didn't, Ned and Emma and countless others wouldn't have been able to figure it out by themselves.