There comes a time in the life of every father when he announces that he has cooked his last Thanksgiving turkey. A lot of good it does him, as I learned when I innocently inquired, “Why not, instead of a turkey on Thursday, I cook something new.”

The youngest squinted. “Like what?” she said.

“How about, say, a goose?”

“A goose!?!” the family council erupted in incredulity.

“A goose would be great,” I said. “It’s different from a turkey — it has flavor.”

“Ewww!” the youngest exclaimed.

“Plus,” I said, “a goose, if properly cooked, is tender.”

“Daaaad. Nobody eats a goose for Thanksgiving. Turkey is a tradition.”

This is one of the great mysteries of childhood. A child can latch onto a tradition faster than a barnacle on a boat. I once had a 4-year-old lecture me on the importance of tradition. The tot had sat through but three Thanksgivings and already concluded that civilization would be threatened if we ditched the turkey for chicken.

Chicken, I explained, would be better than a turkey because chicken is edible.

“Daaaaad,” came the outcry. “On other holidays we eat chicken.”

“And why would that be?” I asked.

The 4-year-old glared at me.

“The point,” I offered, “is that people eat chicken because chicken is — unlike turkey — especially delicious.”

This cut no mustard with anyone. They wanted turkey or nothing. Plus, they had their hearts set on that least-mouth-watering of vegetables — the yam. This orange sweet potato apparently qualifies as “traditional.”

To compensate for the yam’s taste, generations of fathers have invented the dodge of topping the dish with that most glorious contraption, the marshmallow. This trick I’ve refined over the years to the following recipe:

“Father’s Baked Yams: Peel and puree one yam. Place one teaspoon of the pureed yam in a large baking dish. Throw the rest of the yam away and get it out of the house. Fill the remainder of the baking dish with six pounds of marshmallows. Place in oven. Bake until crusted over to a nice brown.”

Baked yam with marshmallow, though, is only one of the fatherly maneuvers around the Thanksgiving tradition. Another was invented to deal with the problem of the stuffing, a bread pudding that is inserted into the turkey in an attempt to give it flavor.

Careful observation over nigh 70 Thanksgivings has convinced me that the problem is that a turkey is impenetrable to flavor. So the trick is putting something to eat in the stuffing. For this I recommend the following recipe:

“Father’s Bread Stuffing: Cube five pounds of steak. Sauté the steak with salt, pepper, and olive oil (or 40-weight motor oil), and a few splashes of Roland’s Chile Oil. Dust the cubed steak with one half teaspoon of breadcrumbs. Stuff into the turkey when no one is looking.”

It doesn’t matter how long one bakes a turkey. It is impervious to proper cooking. One Thanksgiving some years ago I forgot to turn the oven on and baked a turkey for four hours at room temperature. Discovering this error shortly before the repast, I quickly rubbed it down with Kiwi shoe polish.

It looked succulent enough but was still as inedible as a traditional turkey— and just as hard to carve.

Which leads to the last item in father’s bag of Thanksgiving tricks. It’s not that I’m not adept at carving. I can carve a chicken — or a duck — just by looking at it. But turkey proved too tough for my cutlery until, some years ago, I struck upon the common chain saw.

The best way to do this is gas up the monster in advance and hide it under the table among the folds of the holiday table cloth. Then, after the blessings are said, and thanks expressed for the Pilgrims and our soldiers and, above all, to God, then as the turkey is brought out for carving, father can reach under the tablecloth, pull the ripcord, and, brandishing the smoking beast, call out, “Whooo wants a drum stick?”

Twiiiiinng . . .

“Who wants white meat?”

Vrooom . . .

When everyone has their turkey, you can tuck into the baked yam and stuffing — always the best part of the Thanksgiving meal.

This column originally appeared in the New York Post.