Green bean casserole is one of the enduring dishes that just always fits in at a holiday spread. Whether you're celebrating Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa or just a day off work, this simple food will please even the pickiest eaters in your brood.

But it's a dish that's so classic it can come off as stale. This article offers you five tasty recipes that spruce up the old favorite and make it into a dish worth celebrating.

Green bean casserole turns 56 years old this year, according to the Huffington Post, so switching it up a little bit is probably a good idea for keeping all your loved ones happy.

Check out five of our favorite recipes below:

1. Make it healthy: Though its base is the green bean, a food that has no real health downside, when we turn it into a casserole it often becomes a fat-fest to accompany all the other fatty things on our table. So why not cut out all the heavy cream and other unhealthy ingredients and make a slimmed-down version of this classic side dish? This recipe, provided by CBS News, uses olive oil and lower-sodium broth in order to cut down on the calories, so think about checking it out, if you're on a diet or just hoping to keep off the holiday pounds.

2. Make it Italiano-style: This recipe from About.com brings some of the best tastes of Europe's boot to the holiday table by adding tomatoes and mozzarella cheese to elevate the dish from the level of a boring veggie of the day to a gooey treat to look forward to. With large portions of both heavy cream and butter, this is certainly not the way to go if you're watching your figure, but the taste is to die for, and it has the Christmas look of white, red and green.

3. Spice it up: The best way to fix something that's bland is to add a little spice, and this recipe from Wikia.com certainly doesn't skimp on the hot stuff. By adding hot pepper sauce and mustard, it ups the hotness quotient and may have some of your more tame diners reaching for the egg nog. That just leaves more green bean casserole for the rest of us.

4. Make scalloped green beans instead: Though green bean casserole may be the old standby, try this recipe from About.com for a twist by scalloping the beans instead. Everyone's tried scalloped potatoes, why not try the classic preparation with green beans?

5. Add Bacon: The best home chefs know that one of the easiest way to please guests is to add bacon. And this recipe by About.com does just that, combining the scrumptious meat with the thick goodness that is cheddar cheese to create a super-green-bean-casserole of sorts. It's like a bacon cheeseburger vs. a dry turkey burger. There's just no comparison when you're talking bacon.

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