I love Thanksgiving. Seriously, it's my favorite holiday. It's Christmas without the greed, which if you think about it is what Christmas really should be. The food, the family, the parade, the nap, the football ... well, not so much because it's always the damn Lions and Cowboys, but at least I can root against those assholes. It's like sedentary happiness bottled for your convenience.

Of course, I love the turkey. Not just the flavor, even though turkey is delicious. The presentation is something to behold as well. There are only a few times of year when it's not seen as gluttony or overworking yourself to take an entire animal, stuff it with bread, baste it with butter and stick the whole thing in the oven until it's golden brown and delicious.

Thanksgiving without turkey is like Cinco de Mayo without a pitcher of blue margaritas, or Friday night without two pizzas. It's just wrong. So of course packagers are trying to make the turkey easier for us. They disassemble the bird and sell its parts, they take white and dark meats and compress them together in one easy-roasting boneless loaf, they sell turkey cutlets and turkey tenderloins and turkey pot pies. But when you only serve turkey parts, you miss out on that iconic presentation that really says, "Hey, this is Thanksgiving, and here's enough meat to subdue an entire village."

So Jennie-O has come up with a solution. The Oven Ready Turkey comes in a cooking bag, and you just pull it out of the freezer, drop the whole thing in a pan, and go to the oven. That's right -- no thawing.

How does it work? Well, here's a guess: the bird is ten percent "solution." I'm not very good at reading ingredients lists, but I'm pretty sure ten or eleven of them are essentially salt and sugar, both of which lower the freezing temperature of water. So you've really got a ten-pound turkey with fourteen ounces of brine injected into it. This means the bird will be capable of thawing in the cooking time alloted it, a process that normally takes three days in the refrigerator or six to eight hours under cold running water.

This should be great for those of us busy people who still want a good Thanksgiving spread. Except I don't buy it. You're basically putting a 12-pound block of ice in the oven and expecting an even simmer with no vapor loss in four hours. By the time the inside of your turkey is even thawed enough to cook, the outside is gonna be toast, I don't care how foolproof (or "FOOL-PROOF™," as Jennie-O's marketing department would have me write it) your oven bag is.

Besides which, the chemical magic required to thaw and cook a 12-pound turkey in four hours simply cannot be good for us. Consider: a four-ounce "serving" of this miracle bird has 370 milligrams of sodium. An entire can of preservative-laden diet soda, often considered the nutritional Antichrist, only has 35. And who eats four ounces of turkey? Man, that's only one slice. Most experts say you should plan on a pound per guest, with more if you want leftovers for a sandwich.

So thanks but no thanks, Jennie-O. I'll stick to the fresh-frozen turkey and brine the sucker myself.