If this Thanksgiving is like those in recent years, the federal government is going to be worried about the cranberry glut. And the Agriculture Department will be telling American growers to compost tons and tons of these boggy berries.

Good riddance, you say?

Before you do, consider our plan, updated here for the third year, for making good use of this nigh-poisonous pustule. When it comes to inedibility, after all, the cranberry is in a league of its own.

Therein, though, lies the beauty of this bountiful berry. It offers a way to deal with the feature of Thanksgiving that Americans have come to dread above all others — the family arguments about politics.

This plagues holiday tables across the land. It’s Trump this, and Biden that. Plus Obama, Pelosi, DeSantis, Palin, Clinton, and Ocasio-Cortez. People shouting and screaming and throwing drumsticks.

This is where, it strikes us, cranberries might just come in handy. They are that sour — a fact that we discovered some Thanksgivings ago as we were preparing the turkey.

Our dog sat there staring, as he always does, mewling 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 — not to mention canine — consumption.

The poor pooch jumped at the unsweetened 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 (the family dog doctor). 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.”

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.

In our house, we still have a vintage Acme Diesel-Powered Sugar Compressor. It can force three 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 Thanksgiving plan to quell the politics.

The children will, per usual, run the cranberries through the Acme Sugar Compressor. But we’re going to hold back some, stashing under the table a secret reserve 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 we’re going to account to posterity for voting for the Donald.

“Aw, come on,” we’re going to say, “it’s Thanksgiving. Try some natural cranberries, just as the Pilgrims picked them.” Then I’m going to reach under the table and bring out the real thing.

Oooh, it is going to be something to watch some irate goody-goody-two-shoes chomp down on a spoonful of untreated organic cranberries.

It’ll take a few chomps before, suddenly, his hair stands on end and his hands go for his own throat. Then, as the politics-spouting guest is rolling around the floor trying to extricate himself from his own personal salt-water bog, 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 harvest, favored our gallant soldiers, and, in addition to all that, created the cranberry.

________

Adapted from a column that previously appeared in the New York Post and the New York Sun.