Taking a cue from The Onion’s tips on how to cook the perfect Thanksgiving turkey (https://www.theonion.com/how-to-cook-a-perfect-thanksgiving-turkey), here are my tips on how to shop and prepare for Thanksgiving with as little stress as possible:

• Leave for grocery store. As you drive, you try to recall what day of the week it is, then laugh, remembering that the concept of time has ceased to have any significance since March 2020.

• Arrive at grocery store without your list, consider turning back, but assume you’ll know what you need when you see it.

• Pass by the supermarket pie table, scoffing at the browsing customers who obviously don’t bake their own. Immediately buy 20 Granny Smith apples.

• Head to the baking aisle. See an older lady buying cream of tartar and evaporated milk. She looks like she knows what she is doing, so you buy them too, having no idea what you use them for.

• Follow the traffic and buy all of the products at the prominent end aisles, no matter what they are, figuring since everyone else is buying them they must be important.

• Buy another turkey baster and make plans to misplace it as soon as you get home, as you have every year. Make a note to place “turkey baster” on your list for next year and make concrete plan to lose the list too.

• Spend an hour in the magazine section looking at People magazine’s “100 Most Beautiful People,” noting that you have missed the list yet again.

• Buy frozen puff pastry, happy it is on sale, and wonder as usual as to its general purpose. Make plans to freeze it until summer when it is finally freezer-burned and you have to throw it out to make room for freeze pops.

• Buy way too much butter, sour cream, cream cheese, heavy cream, eggs and cheese because you always run out of something.

• Buy apple pie on way to register. Return Granny Smiths.

• Checkout and see that you have spent $200 dollars on groceries, then agree to meet your friend for decadent lunch.

• Arrive home, unload your groceries and leave all random non-refrigerated items on side counter, hoping they will assemble into something coherent by power-of-suggestion.

• Wake up disappointed to see that the strange ingredients have not organized themselves into a recipe on the counter.

• Read sixty articles on how to defrost the turkey breast, wondering again why there are so many rules. What makes them so fragile? Leave turkey out on counter for a few hours then go to bed, forgetting to put it back in fridge.

• Wake up and realize what you’ve done and become afraid the turkey is now tainted. Call the country club and order take-out.

• Donate all dry ingredients.

Happy Thanksgiving!