But let’s talk turkey for a moment, even though a fair percentage of families choose something different than a Christmas turkey at Christmastime—around half. For Thanksgiving, 45 million turkeys were slipped into ovens—or deep-fat fryers—to help celebrate our national day of Thanksgiving.

So I have a question for you: how many turkeys are cooked on Christmas Day?

Answer: all of them.

Okay, that’s a little joke, but seriously, around 22 million turkeys are eaten on Christmas, or around half of those eaten at Thanksgiving, which is a hint to one of the questions on a “Turkey Trivia” test that you can take online. Here’s the link: http://home.aristotle.net/Thanksgiving/trivia.asp

All this turkey talk gives me an opening to talk about the different kind of turkeys that you could be shopping for this Christmas. If a turkey is in your future, here’s the bottom line on turkey labels:

• Conventionally grown. If the plastic cover wrapped around the cover doesn’t boast about being “free-range” or “organic,” then you’ve got a run-of-the-mill conventional turkey—what they call a Broad Breasted White. Apparently, conventional turkeys are raised in barns where they’re allowed to move around, but they never see the light of day.

Are conventional turkeys pumped full of hormones to fatten them up? Actually, it’s been illegal to treat any poultry, including turkeys, with hormones since the 1950s. So if the packaging touts their product as being “hormone free,” well . . . those birds are supposed to be hormone free.

• Free-range. If you’re thinking that “free-range” turkeys roam acres of verdant pastures before meeting their fate, you should know that the U.S. Department of Agriculture says “free-range” can be applied to any turkey that has “access” to the outdoors. In other words, a “free-range” turkey might or might not go outside, depending upon their mood or what’s outside to eat, I would imagine. Turkeys that do like the outdoors love to eat bugs, but they’re given turkey chow, too.

• Organic. The definition of an organic turkey means that they are allowed to eat the same sort of feed as conventional turkeys, but the feed ingredients must be certified organic. Organic turkeys must given free-range access and can never be treated with antibiotics.

• Heritage. These birds come from old-fashioned breeds like Beltsville Small Whites and Standard Bronzes. They don’t grow to be as big as their cousins, the plump Broad Breasted Whites, but they must be raised in a free-range, organic manner. These are the most expensive turkeys you can purchase.

Organic and Heritage turkeys are certainly excellent meats because a 100-gram serving (3.5 ounces) breaks down to 135 calories, 30.1 grams of protein, and less than a gram of fat. Skinless turkey breast is about as fat-free a meat as you can serve.

The big fad these days is deep-frying your turkey, a Southern tradition that seals the outside of the turkey with a crisp texture while the inside stays juicy. Fans of deep-fried turkeys say that if the cooking oil stays hot enough, deep-frying doesn’t add fat to a turkey. They also say you can deep-fry a turkey in a lot less time than using an oven or rotisserie grill.

But my beef with deep-fried turkey is that the recipes call for using oil with a high smoke point: peanut oil, canola oil, corn oil, and sunflower oil. These are all highly refined oils, heavy in omega-6 fatty acids (which we get too much of these days), and examples of partially hydrogenated oils. These type of oils contain trans fat, which have been called a “slow form of poison” by heart specialists. Trans fats are twice as dangerous for your heart as saturated fat and is the reason why major cities around the country are passing laws banning restaurants from serving foods cooked with trans fats.

So I hope you purchased an Organic or Heritage turkey this year—and plan to bake it in the over or on a rotisserie grill.