Thanksgiving is right around the corner, and if you’ve spent your entire life up to this point hunting Bigfoot with your eccentric Bigfoot-hunter parents, then Thanksgiving is a holiday where we cram our faces and don’t have to go to work.

Thanksgiving is a unique holiday because our entire celebration of the holiday revolves around one particular food item: turkey. In fact, turkey is basically all Thanksgiving is. Oh sure, there’s other stuff, like pie, stuffing, football, plays about the friendship between pilgrims and Indians, those weird horns overflowing with food, yams and awkward family shouting matches.

However, turkey is always the symbol used to represent Thanksgiving on generic holiday decorations and in Clipart. And it’s not like it’s a mystery why that is. Everybody eats turkey on Thanksgiving. Sure, there are some nonconformists who eat ham, deer, chicken or processed soybeans made into the shape of something that tastes nothing like soybeans. But those people are freaks; all normal people eat turkey on Thanksgiving.

And the reason why everybody eats turkey on Thanksgiving? Tryptophan. Everybody eats turkey because of a necessary amino acid that makes you sleepy. If there’s one thing people like about Thanksgiving, it’s being whacked-out on turkey.

Thanksgiving is called “Turkey Day” because when we as a society think of the last Thursday in November, we think of sitting half-asleep on the couch, stoned on poultry while we watch the Detroit Lions fumble numerous times.

What other holiday is completely defined by a food item? None! There are eggs during Easter, but nobody eats the eggs, especially if they’ve been hidden and hunted. Nobody wants to eat a hard-boiled egg that has soaked for five minutes in a cup full of dye that would turn your pee green if you drank it, let alone a hard-boiled egg that has spent two hours sitting behind the furnace.

Christmas has eggnog, but that’s just pancake batter and booze. And then there’s St. Patrick’s Day, and we all know what’s ingested to celebrate that holiday.

I say instead of denying this fact and pretending like there’s more to Thanksgiving than eating turkey drugs, we embrace it. All of our holidays could be much more enjoyable if we’d only bake Christmas cookies with morphine or give each other chalky little tablets of LSD shaped like hearts with cute little romantic phrases engraved on them.

But there are more benefits to an all-inebriated holiday than just vomiting acid. For example, if you can’t stand your family, it will be significantly less stressful being around them on the holidays when you’re heavily sedated and you have no idea what’s going on.