Celebrity chef Mario Batali was recalling a Thanksgiving kitchen disaster that wound up becoming a family tradition.

“When my brother and I were in college,” he related in a recent Parade magazine article, “we were moving the turkey and dropped the whole thing — the stuffing exploded out of the bird! We quickly picked it back up. We thought that was our best turkey, and in subsequent years, we actually dropped a little stuffing on the floor just for good luck.”

While I don’t necessarily recommend bouncing your bird on the floor for luck, I loved the story. Because tradition is what Thanksgiving is all about.

Before dinner tomorrow the males in our family will go outside and toss a football, regardless of wind, rain, snow or lack of athletic ability. The females in our family, meanwhile, will sit inside around the fireplace, sip wine and talk. Which probably says something about relative intelligence.

When the turkey is ready for carving, the job falls to me, even though I’m lousy at it. Which, when I carry the platter to the table, inevitably leads to the comment, “Hey, Dad, what did you carve this turkey with, a sledgehammer?”

The Thanksgiving dinner menu, of course, always is the same and no changes are tolerated. When my wife tried to replace the soggy green beans in mushroom soup casserole one year with a Brussels sprouts recipe she found in a hotsy-totsy magazine, you could hear the screaming all the way to Belgium. You don’t mess with tradition.

Each year, it seems, sweet potatoes with marshmallows on top linger in the oven just a few seconds too long, causing the marshmallows to ignite. So now the annual mantra has become, “Dinner isn’t ready until the smoke alarm goes off.”

And, while I never have dribbled the turkey, there was one year in which, while I was concentrating on hammering it to pieces, the juice dribbled over the edge of the carving board — directly onto the dog prancing at my feet on the kitchen floor. What didn’t wind up in his mouth matted the fur all over his back and he spent the rest of the weekend licking it off.

Every year since then we recall the incident and laugh about what I’m sure that dog, if he could talk, would have called “Best. Thanksgiving. Ever.”

Because that’s what Thanksgiving is all about. Little things. Silly things. Inconsequential moments that become traditions.

The dog is no longer with us. But maybe this year, while I’m bludgeoning the bird, I’ll make sure that just a few drops of juice find their way to the kitchen floor.

Because a family never can have too many Thanksgiving traditions.