Sometime next week, America will again fall prey to its annual pandemic of cooking anxiety. Thanksgiving is coming! Are you ready?

Newspaper food sections will be serving up sensible, church-lady recipes with names like “No-Fail Stuffing.” Magazines will try to convince you to attempt fanciful recipes like gingered squash bisque in a hollowed-out pumpkin and make your own marshmallows for the sweet potato casserole. Supermarket ads will whisper temptation in your ear: “Don’t make any of that stuff. Just buy it, all of it, prepared.”

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Associated Press

Thanksgiving dinner intimidates even experienced cooks.

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John Kessler writes food features and a column about food and more for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution E-mail John Kessler Recent Kessler columns Your fool-proof checklist for Thanksgiving  Hours of low-temperature cooking yield tender, juicy meat  Different things to sample on my new dining menu         More John Kessler Related: John Kessler's blog: Food & More John Kessler's recipes Meridith Ford Goldman's Table Talk Jeanne Besser's Feeding Frenzy Evening Edge Atlanta Restaurant reviews and search Recipes from Atlanta restaurants Favorite Atlanta recipes

Everyone will encourage you to brine your turkey, rub it with spices, slip sweet herbs under the skin and then take it to a spa for a hot stone treatment and sage aromatherapy.

Thanksgiving dinner — a meal like any other just infinitely more vast — intimidates even experienced cooks.

No wonder. Who doesn’t hold a not-so-cherished memory of awakening on Thanksgiving Day and finding our harried mothers in the kitchen, their hands stuffed into the gooey cavity of a hapless creature, looking more like a triage nurse in an army M.A.S.H. unit than a happy homemaker?

The very best strategy for avoiding this fate would be to get yourself invited to one of those huge get-togethers where everyone is responsible for only one assigned dish. Then, all you have to provide is six gallons of green bean casserole and an iron-cast stomach. Or, if you’re lucky, you get to be the folding-chairs-and-paper-napkins person.

But if you are going to host a Thanksgiving dinner and cook it yourself, let me be the first to offer false words of reassurance. It’s not too bad.

Let’s put it this way. If you can avoid the completely stomach-churning trip to the supermarket the night before and the 4 a.m. raw poultry wake-up call, you will survive without resorting to drink or violence. You may even prepare one of those meals that people will remember fondly for years to come. Either that, or one of those raw-turkey fiascoes, the memory of which your friends will summon forth every time they drink.

So, plan ahead. Please digest this tip sheet, which will help you organize your efforts, keep anxiety at bay and perhaps become the vessel into which you’ll pour all your hopes and dreams.