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Rob Delaney's Thanksgiving Dinner Survival Guide ~ If you can, keep the peace. The goal is to eat until you go into a coma, and it's hard to go into a coma when you're fighting.

 

But if your uncle wants to talk either politics or says something about your date's outfit, and you figure, Am I going to have to get in the middle of something? you don't want to begin right away with the ad hominem attacks. You might want to approach it from a more oblique angle. You can try to distract or diffuse. Like, you're stuffing your body with food, so making a noise with your body that isn't talking, that could be really helpful. Or knock over a candle—a small fire—but only do that if you have a nearby fire extinguisher.

 

And consider your audience. If you feel that other people might benefit from your answer to a controversial question, then you can really get into how you feel. Say you have a relative who is like, "I don't think poor people should be able to have access to healthcare." If someone yelled that to me on the street, I'm not going to engage with a crazy person. But if there are younger people around or impressionable people, then maybe it is worth your while to take him out at the knees.
Also: A Word On Elastic

 

Sweatpants in public, in adulthood are saying, Something is wrong here. I have relatives absolutely who have worn sweatpants to Thanksgiving, and I pray for them. Also, I've been sober for eleven years because my behavior when I was drinking was really terrible. But I never went as low as elastic-waist denim pants.

Sometimes you just have to go on the attack and mention the aggressor's string of failed marriages.

Elderly people are going to die soon. This might be your last Thanksgiving with them, so you don't need to educate them. What are you going to do? Slap yourself on the back and be like, Yeah! You showed that elderly person.

 

If I'm arguing with somebody smarter than me or has a larger vocabulary of filthy curse words, at that point I'm not above throwing an entire ham at them. You may have to graduate to ham.

But you can call me an idiot right to my face if I'm stuffing it. I've got work to do.

People only fight when they're miserable. So if they want to be miserable, let them do their thing. It's like if you see poop on the street, don't be like, "Oh, I hate poop!" and then step in it on purpose and smear it around and participate in the poop. That's sort of the same thing.

Who says you're supposed to like your family? That's not what this is about. I'm not trying to mend fences here. I'm not trying to make people happy. We came here to eat, and you're making that difficult, sir or madame.

 

You can also hand dishes to people that you want to curry favor with. It'll be easier to borrow money from a grandparent if you've lovingly placed their favorite biscuits in front of them. Or Jell-O mold. Your youngest cousin? Screw them.

You have to abandon pride wherever your family is considered. If nobody is crying, and I'm still able to be essentially drinking gravy—the rolls are sort of a formality—then I'm going to be happy.