By Risa Askerooth

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The family with the minivan in their driveway and a flag hung on their porch has had the same Christmas dinner for 50 years. Mashed potatoes and gravy, brussel sprouts, plum pudding, biscuits, squash and, of course, the signature, frozen turkey: thawed, glazed and roasted approximately seven hours before the meal.

This year the Hillshire Farm frozen turkey was not prepared or even bought. It was not selected with pride as the caged, GMO-infused gem, like it normally is. Instead, the turkey farm of the poultry isle was bypassed entirely.

Suburban wives pushing shopping carts all gasped as a different section was approached, one that had been obsolete for centuries in late December. Cobwebs hung on the shelves, and a fine layer of dust had settled in the air. Hams, dozens of them, stared up from their graves. This was the day, in Foodland, that a ham was selected for Christmas.

Forget for a moment that turkey has been a trademark of Christmas since Jesus of Nazareth’s birth and that the bird, stuffed with various fixings and surrounded by a bed of apples, has been likened to the stripes on the flag, the drunken slurs of football games.

Rather, think instead of honey glazed, slow-roasted, non-traditional celebrations. America has for too long been favoring tradition over taste, and it is now time that we must embrace what we have truly wanted and what has gone unspoken since the Americans realized that they loved meat when Santa first came to town.

It is time that America buys a well-needed ham.

The honey-glazed outside and the tender inside is what citizens have needed for decades. Once you have tasted ham, there is no going back to the blandness of turkey, despite what tradition might say. The pleasing pear shape of the ham and its mobility is much more ideal than a wide, heavy platter filled with turkey.

We have not given voice to this inner desire of ours in fear of our long history with the bird. Indeed, all American citizens lie awake at night wondering what the government would do if they had learned of our ultimate betrayal. The government system, the daily lives, it would all be disrupted if ham was chosen over the beloved turkey.

However, despite what we may think, it only takes one person to cause a revolution, one person to march into that grocery store and declare that families across the nation have had enough of the dry, flavorless and boring.

We must rise up as one people and tell the government that we have a dream. Soon, there will be riots in the supermarkets across the globe, demanding what we have been entitled to since birth. Ham signs, riots, marches, demonstrations, it will all come in due time. Once it is realized that ham is the answer to all American issues, the commotion will die down, and life will return to realative normalcy.

Except this time ham must triumph.

Ham must rise out of the grave of Easter. We must build a better world for ourselves, one accepting of different meat by-products, starting with one Christmas at a time.

It is time for America to take a walk on the wild side.