What luck. Just as I was sitting down to write a Thanksgiving column, the news broke that one in three Americans vows to avoid talking politics at the holiday table.

My plan had been a column warning of the cranberry. Which, I figured, would make a fitting follow-up to previous columns on the tastelessness of turkey and the horribleness of the yam.

When it comes to inedibility, after all, the cranberry is in a league of its own. How this poisonous pustule fetched up in a holiday aimed at giving thanks is a mystery.

No doubt it has to do with the fact that the Pilgrims disembarked in the heart of the Ocean Spray company’s briniest bog. Everywhere they looked there were cranberries.

As I prepared to start my column, though, the news wires suddenly clattered with a Reuters dispatch about avoiding politics. All because of Presidents Obama and Trump.

When Americans gather this year, Reuters reckons, “nearly one third of all adults will actively avoid political conversations.” How, though, to get the others to stifle themselves?

It occurs to me that cranberries might just come in handy. They are that sour — a fact that I discovered some Thanksgivings ago as I was preparing the turkey.

The dog sat there staring, as he always does, meuling for a morsel. Without thinking, I suggested that one of the children throw the hound a cranberry.

Big mistake. For we hadn’t yet injected the cranberries with sugar, which leaches out the sourness and makes a cranberry fit for human consumption.

The poor pooch jumped at the untreated cranberry and started masticating. Suddenly, his tail shot up in the air and his eyes took on the shape of a vertical oval.

Then the dog’s nose moved away from his skull and the sides of his mouth were sucked in. So sour was the blasted berry that the dog actually sucked his whole body into his own mouth.

The children and I were horrified, as our Fido became a ball of dog-lips with a tail sticking out and started rolling around the kitchen. “Call a vet!” one of the girls cried, leaping onto a table.

Another raced to fetch their mother (who had proposed getting the dog in the first place). She dashed in and scooped the puckered up pooch into the sink.

“Quick, some water,” she shouted. We turned on the water, but the ball of dog lips just kept bobbing around the sink, until someone shouted “Sugar! Sugar!”

I raced into the pantry and hauled out a hundred pound bag of refined sugar. We normally stock half a ton, which is how much sugar one needs to make a pound of cranberries edible.

Otherwise, feature Fido.

In our house, we still have a vintage Acme Gasoline-Powered Sugar Compressor. It can force 50 pounds of sugar into a single cranberry. One of the boys jumped on its kickstarter.

The contraption sputtered to life, and the lad dumped in two sacks of sugar. The pressure gauge started rising. We grabbed the nozzle and put it right up to the ball of dog.

As the compressed sugar started to flow, the pooch suddenly relaxed. Soon the dog backed out of its own mouth and, presto, it was sitting in the sink, smiling contentedly.

Hence my plan.

The children will, per usual, run the cranberries through the Acme Sugar Compressor. But I’m going to stash under the serving table a secret side dish of raw, un-sugared cranberries.

It’ll just take one alt-right agitator to look up from his turkey and call me a communist for favoring immigration. Or one leftist lugnut asking how I’m going to account to posterity for endorsing the Donald.

“Aw, come on,” I’m going to say, “it’s Thanksgiving. Try some cranberries.” Then I’m going to reach under the serving table and hand him the real thing.

Then, as the politics-spouting guest is rolling around the floor trying to extricate himself from his own sourpuss, I’m going to offer a new prayer of thanks.

It will be to the Father of all Mercies, who guided the Pilgrims hither, gave us this great bounty, favored our gallant soldiers, and, in addition to all that, created the cranberry.