The New Thanksgiving Rules

Ah, Thanksgiving: that warm, fuzzy holiday where families gather to express gratitude for all their blessings while consuming mass quantities. Where relatives who haven’t spoken in years get reacquainted with all the reasons they haven’t spoken in years. Where the creepy drunk uncles get handsy with the female guests. And where the timing of the meal must account for the potential outbreak of sectarian warfare at the Thanksgiving altar, also known as the television, over the issue of which NFL game must be sacrificed to an hour or two of gluttony, and whether the Thanksgiving prayer may be delayed until halftime.

If you’ve been with me for a few years, you know I’m fond of declaring rules (which I, of course, have no power or authority to enforce. Doesn’t keep me from declaring them, though). One set of rules I’m particularly devoted to are the rules about Thanksgiving. I even made a special set of Thanksgiving rules for the pandemic.

But oh, this year–this year is going to require some exceptional intestinal fortitude. And I’m not talking about digesting Aunt Edna’s pureed turnip and rutabaga casserole.

I’m talking about how to get through the meal with relatives who are of a radically different political persuasion. Although fights around the Thanksgiving table may be a tradition in your family, this year you’d better buckle up: it’s going to be an even bumpier ride than 2016.

So I’ve come up with a list of rules (OK, suggestions) that I hope might help you get through sharing a table with folks who say stuff that makes your blood boil. Sometimes your fellow diners are doing it deliberately just to get a rise out of you. Other times they’re just parroting positions they’ve heard others espouse, without really thinking them through. Either way, I think a few these tactics could help:

1. Practice smiling indulgently. A week or so in advance of the holiday, stand in front of your mirror, and arrange your face the way you would if you were watching an infant do something perfectly adorable but also perfectly disgusting. Bring your indulgent smile with you. If your host is someone you expect to start right in on you, put that smile on your face before they even open the door, and try to keep it there for as long as possible.
2. Do Not Engage. When spending Thanksgiving in mixed political company, passive aggression is your friend. When a loaded or rhetorical question or an odious remark is directed to you in expectation of an extreme reaction, simply hold that indulgent smile long enough for everyone at the table to pause their conversation in anticipation of a piercing response that escalates the discussion toward an argument on its way to a fistfight, and answer the question with a complete non-sequitur. Say “expecting snow this weekend?” or “How ’bout them (insert name of universally admired professional sports team here.) If you are in the American south, you can preface your non-answer answer with “well bless your heart,” which is the gentile, Southern way of calling someone an idiot without actually saying “you’re an idiot.”
3. Deploy the Irish good-bye. If the provocateur is not flying solo, but is accompanied by a chorus of like-minded blowhards guffawing at whatever misogynistic, racist, homophobic, climate- or vaccine- or science-denying remark or loopy conspiracy theory cousin Hank just expounded upon, slowly pick up your plate and drift into the kitchen, where everyone will assume you’re just refilling it, or clearing it. Then quietly find the stash of Tupperware (it’s there somewhere, in a drawer or cabinet) and pack yourself a very generous portion of leftovers. I mean, take turkey, ham, gravy, potatoes, cranberry sauce, dinner rolls, mac and cheese, big scoops of green bean and sweet potato mini-marshmallow casseroles, and slices of both kinds of pie, and then just slip out the back door and go home. Just disappear without a word. Your absence will not register before all the cousins and drunk uncles have fallen into a food coma in front of the altar…erm, I mean, TV, leaving anyone left standing to clean up and make coffee or tea before they wake up the comatose and tell them to come back to the table for pie.
4. Once home, open that nice bottle of wine you bought but didn’t bring with you. Fix yourself a plate of those leftovers, turn on some Bach cello suites or some Hildegaard, and then turn off the lights, lean back in your comfy chair, and check Thanksgiving off your post-election “made it through that one” scorecard. With any luck, a year or two from now, those of your relatives who thought that unleashing the Kraken in Washington, D.C. was a good idea will notice that their lives have not, in fact, gotten better, but instead measurably worse. They’ll discover that the price of eggs has not gone down, and the price of everything else has gone up. They’ll learn that deporting millions of people takes years, and they’ll register surprise that, while immigrants were languishing in detention, steaks and cut-up fryers disappeared from the meat department because processing plants have shut down for lack of workers, and U.S. citizens won’t do low-paying, dirty, dangerous jobs. They’ll also find that no one’s around to mow their lawn, nanny their kids, clean their house, build their addition, or harvest their crops–what’s left of them after the next severe drought. And they’ll be perplexed that coffee and chocolate and orange juice are regularly absent from grocery shelves because the planet just keeps getting hotter, encouraging more severe storms, and spreading pests and diseases that damage those crops, and the places that used to grow them can’t grow them anymore.

But I urge you, when Thanksgiving 2025 rolls around, resist saying “I told you so.” Just keep smiling indulgently, and by Thanksgiving 2026, you might even discover your difficult relatives actually voted the same way you did in the 2026 mid-terms.

Off to the grocery store to fill a Thanksgiving meal donation bag to drop off at church, I remain,

your so-eff-ing-grateful-that-Thanksgiving-is-just-the-two-of-us,

Ridiculouswoman