According to its Twitter bio, the Australian Jewish Association (AJA) is a "membership-based organization for the Australian Jewish community based on authentic Jewish and centre-right values." Those values were put to the test when the group noticed something off about a bag being sold at Australian Kmart locations.

The festive sack was meant to store ham, presumably for a holiday meal, so the retail chain thought it would be a fun idea to add a little thematic messaging. Sadly it was more traumatic than thematic. The AJA was the first to point out the slip-up in a tweet from Nov. 7, 2023. "Check out the special Christmas bag currently available via K-Mart online. Yes, it's real," they wrote.

Writing on the bag reads Merry Ham-Mas which is of course supposed to reference its intended purpose, which is ham storage. Unfortunately, despite the hyphen, the bag appears to say Merry Hamas. In response to this the AJA sent a letter to Wesfarmers, Kmart Australia's parent company.

The very next day, the AJA replied to their tweet with an update. "An AJA success, we were just contacted by senior management. The Kmart Ham-Mas bag is being pulled now from the website and all stores," they wrote. Responses in the comments were mixed. A lot of people simply replied with a variation of, "It's ham." Others were grateful the bag was removed.

Context was added to the original tweet by other Twitter users who said, "It's a bag for a Christmas ham. That sort of joke wording has been around for a long time." They then linked to a Facebook post from Maidment's Meat Service in December 2020. "Merry Ham-mas," they wrote. "The team at Maidment's are sending lots of love to our family and friends in NSW who can't be with us this Christmas due to border closures." The Wikipedia page for Christmas ham was also included.