How to Get Through Today's Thanksgiving Dinner in 3 Easy Steps

As you may have noticed without my help today is Thanksgiving.

Which probably means you’re going to have dinner with somebody and that dinner might include alcohol and thank God for that because who wants to face the family members you’ve been avoiding all year without being heavily medicated.

But being heavily medicated has a few drawbacks and assuming you’re reading this before that cousin you detest shows up an hour-and-a-half early to watch football on your TV, drink your booze and teach your kids new swear words while you’re in the kitchen trying to prepare a dinner that would make the Normandy Invasion look simple, now would be a good time to commit a few simple Thanksgiving Dinner Rules to memory.

And we’ll start with…

1. Impose a 24-Hour Embargo on Honesty

First, let’s talk about the effects of alcohol because I recently read an article about that and reading one article makes me a better source of inebriation information than the millions of people who read no articles and here’s what that one article said:

People sometimes think alcohol “reveals your true self” which might not be a good thing because if you’re anything like me your true self can occasionally be a bit of an asshole.

But now that we can measure the parts of the brain that are being used (and the parts that aren’t) they’ve discovered that alcohol doesn’t really “reveal your true self” it depresses the part of the brain that thinks about the future.

So your brain called in sick today and isn’t thinking about the consequences of having a third helping of pecan pie or telling your hot cousin you have a crush on him and/or her (and these days, possibly both at the same time) or calling your misinformed and talkative uncle a Fucking Moron.   

Before you do any of those things, try to get your Whiskey Sour-clouded brain to think about tomorrow and if any of those things are a really a good idea today, they’ll still be a really good idea in 24 hours. (And odds are your uncle will still be a Fucking Moron come Monday so take your time on that one.)

People say they appreciate honesty and when they say that they’re lying.  

Thanksgiving dinner is not a good time to inform a family member that the pants they’re wearing do not make their ass look big, their big ass makes those pants look small or your brother’s kids are a bunch of spoiled brats with the manners of rabid wolverines or your mother has always been a passive/aggressive manipulator who plays her children against each other so they won’t love their siblings and all their love will be reserved for her.

All of which may be true, but don’t say it while you’re drinking.

Give it 24 hours and if you still want to say any of those things be my guest, but start making alternative plans because there’s a decent chance you won’t be invited to next year’s Thanksgiving get-together.

(Apparently the Chinese Restaurant Industry has a nation-wide policy of staying open on Thanksgiving to serve the millions of Americans who were overly-honest in the past and managed to piss off everybody they know. If you see somebody carrying a takeout order of General Tso’s Chicken and Crab Rangoon this Thanksgiving, that’s somebody who decided to tell the truth last Thanksgiving. )

Frankly, a lot of that bottled-up anger needs to stay bottled up right where it is and while it might temporarily feel good to get it off your chest, in the long run it might be better to develop a drinking habit accompanied by a stress-related ulcer and share your family complaints with a disinterested bartender.

That’s how our parents did it and they were considered The Greatest Generation and subsequent generations are considered a Bunch of Whiners who have to “share” how disrespected and disappointed they feel when they see their non-vegan grandfather who was a WW2 tank commander, survived the Battle of the Bulge and Saved Democracy eat a slice of ham. 

2. Don’t Talk Politics

In the History of Arguments (and that includes the Lincoln-Douglas Debates) I’m unaware of even one of them ending with one of the participants saying:

“Now that you explain it to me it’s pretty clear I don’t know what I’m talking about; you’re right, I’m wrong and for the rest of the evening I should shut the fuck up.”

You’d think Stephen A. Douglas might have reached that conclusion and I’ve occasionally thought that about myself, but I’m never going to admit it out loud and neither are you so why get into an argument when you know absolutely nothing will be settled with the possible exception of solidifying your friends’ and family’s previously vague impression that you’re a horse’s ass?

There are millions of topics besides politics to talk about, so why jump into an area pretty much guaranteed to cause disagreements with no resolution and unless one of you is pretty high up in Hamas and the other one is secretly in the Mossad, having an argument about terrorism and the future of Israel while screaming at each other in your aunt’s garage won’t change shit.

I’m a Liberal Political Cartoonist with plenty of Surprisingly Conservative Friends and you know how we stay friends?

WE DON’T TALK POLITICS.

Here, you want an alternative topic?

Are Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift a real couple or is their relationship a giant publicity stunt and if so, who’s using whom and who’s getting the most out of it and now that I write all that down, from what I understand about the rabidity of Taylor Swift fans, you might be better off discussing real estate development in Palestine.

3. When All Else Fails, Drop a Conversation Ender

We’ve now reached the point of the evening where certain family members, who don’t read my essays and have made the grave mistake of deciding to drink, be honest and talk politics all at the same time are getting ready to ruin yet another Thanksgiving.

You see disaster lurking ahead and don’t want any part of it; what do you do?

Some people collect stamps or baseball cards or Playboys from the 1970s, but lucky for you I collect one-liners and write them down and save them in hopes of remembering to use one on an appropriate occasion and the following one-liners are what I consider “conversation enders.”

If you think about it – and I have – people spend way too much time worrying about starting conversations with pick-up lines and ice breakers and way too little time worrying about how to get out of crappy conversations, which is dumb because we’ve all been in more conversations we want to get out of than in to and here’s how you do it:

1. Drop a great one-liner.

2. Leave the room.

Leaving the room is essential because it signals that you’re not interested in what’s being said and won’t waste any more time listening to someone else’s bullshit and I’ve had it done to me and here’s how that went:

Jason Kendall and I were working on a book and I had an idea to promote it and he said what’s your idea and I said: “We get a video camera…”

And before I could finish my sentence, Jason said, “You lost me” and left the room.

Which had the twin virtues of making me laugh and letting me know I was wasting my breath and needed to stop talking about video cameras immediately.

OK, the easy part is leaving the room, but you still need a good one-liner to drop the mic on and what follows are some one-sentence exit lines.

A WORD OF WARNING:

These are verbal atomic bombs and should be used wisely and then you should definitely get the hell out of blast radius because there will be radioactive fallout and weeks later the Atomic Energy Commission will send someone with a Geiger counter into your brother’s dining room to see if it’s safe to reenter and it won’t be.

As I learned from decades of editorial board meetings, if you say 10 things and nine are stupid, but one is brilliant people will think you’re stupid. But edit out the nine dumb things and say the one brilliant thing and people will think you’re combination of Dave Chappelle and Albert Einstein.

Shakespeare said, “Brevity is the soul of wit” but said it in Hamlet, a play that has over 4,000 lines and 30,000 words and takes over four hours to perform, so avoid that rookie mistake.  

These lines come from some of my favorite authors and should be memorized and used carefully because once you drop one and walk out, Thanksgiving dinner might be over:

• “I’d love a look at the data that supports that.”

• “One needn’t say everything one thinks of.”

• “Maybe if I don’t speak it’s better.”

• “Talking may be overrated.”

• “Take two aspirin and lie down.”

• “If it makes you angry, why talk about it?”

• “I’m comfortable not thinking about it.”

And as Jason Kendall so ably demonstrated:

• “You lost me.”

Now here’s a line from Mick Herron, author of Slow Horses, and I’m giving it to you with the additional warning that the exact right set of circumstances need to present themselves for you to use it effectively, but if those circumstances should arise I wouldn’t want you to be unprepared so here it is:

“You look rough as fuck. Like you were up half the night being gang-banged and the rest writing thank you notes.”

Say that to a relative and you might not get invited over for Christmas or next year’s Thanksgiving, but you will become a Family Legend and every year small children will gather at the knee of a favorite aunt or uncle to hear how Once Upon a Time you called your sister a whore and why they’re never going to meet you in person.

The Power of Indifference

It has come to my attention that people want you to care about a wide variety of things, including but not limited to:

Their choice of presidential candidates, the ethics involved in choosing paper or plastic, whether the turkey is drier than last year’s, their charity and upcoming walkathon and your possible financial participation, your insufferable nephew’s high school graduation, the condition of the living room drapes, whether your first cousin’s second wife is a bitch, the correct ingredients for potato salad, their problems at work, their problems at home and their problems at family gatherings.

If being alive much longer than I expected (my dad died at 46) has taught me anything, it’s this:

You don’t have to care.

The sooner you learn not to care about someone else’s opinions and/or problems, the happier you’ll be. And if being indifferent doesn’t do the trick and they keep insisting that you have an opinion and express it, say, “You lost me” and leave the room.

Now have a Happy Thanksgiving.