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God, where did we get all of these egg shells? Totally irresponsible of us to buy all of these egg shells and place them directly underneath every step between the oven and the dinner table on Thanksgiving day.

 

Oh, wait, we didn't buy these egg shells. No one would do that. No, these egg shells were just lopped on the floor ten seconds ago, when a stray uncle you see once a year dropped a racist neologism we thought was abandoned altogether sometime during the Eisenhower administration, like a lost sock on a highway. He has now opened the proverbial egg shell floodgate. They're everywhere now. Your grandfather is now simultaneously carving a spiral ham and hitting on your brother's "exotic" girlfriend. (She's from Michigan.) Your cousin is telling everyone how steroids aren't that bad and, here, feel this, he can prove it. Your sister -- the one you thought to be the calm, reasonable center -- has now ducked away to have a fun, record-quick cry in the bathroom.

This didn't have to happen. There are sentences and words one can avoid to prevent a family's fast slide into an awkward and quiet dessert. These are Thanksgiving dinner trigger words. Some of these change every year. Some are timeless. You should say none of them. The nation is counting on you to keep this peaceful Thanksgiving dinner charade alive.

Edward Snowden - Is he a traitor? Is he a hero? Is that the carving knife in your jugular? Yes.

"What is your girlfriend? Indian? Something like that?" - Maybe. Now you'll never know.

The Second Amendment - No faster way of starting a gunfight than bringing up gunfights.

Referencing a desire to eat a food not at the table - This is not the time to let people know you haven't had a Spree in three years.

Bullying - "In my day, nuns used to hit me in the head with a hammer just for being alive!" This is a tremendous sentence, but it's a gateway to older folks inquiring why you're not pummeling your kid when he asks to put on Spongebob during the football game.

9/11 - Are you fking nuts?

"Hey (girlfriend of relative), why aren't you comfortable?" - Because she is trapped in a stranger's house with 50 misshapen clones of her boyfriend for several hours, and you're asking this question.

The Washington Redskins - There are three teams in the NFC East this Thanksgiving, and only two if you've seen the Giants play recently.

Obamacare - Who knew your uncle would be telling you how websites worked at Thanksgiving this year? Quite a turn from last year, when he thought Tumblr was a gymnastics magazine.

The inevitable GoDaddy.com commercial - It is acceptable to physically leave your home for the duration of this commercial.

Moving to Canada for political reasons - If you're on the fence, you probably should move to Canada. Their public radio stations are bananas, and you could wind up marrying Feist. (Loud growling noise.) Do not bring it up today. A good Canadian keeps a secret.

Steroids - This will invariably end in a tiny balls joke and then those boiled onions will just sit there on the table untouched until everyone leaves.

Richie Incognito - I'm not sure you're in line for a difference of opinion on this guy, but I thought we all took a blood oath, as Americans, to pretend like this man no longer exists.

"Is that all you're going to eat?" - Yes, it's all she's going to eat.

Asking to put on something other than football in the second half - Just pretend like you care about how the Lions are doing like the rest of America has done with grace for the last half-century.

"Millennials" - No one wants to hear about how lazy you think they are because you can't figure out what a Bitcoin is.

Benghazi - "I'm just asking the question because no one has a straight answer!" Neither does anybody else at this table.

George Zimmerman - He's a certified scumbag, but there's always one guy who's not convinced.

Customer service phone calls - Thanks a lot for this definitely-going-to-happen-now conversation, Kindle Fire ads.

The Knockout Game - Doesn't exist. Carry on.

Eyeball jewelry - Does exist, but we'd like to eat. Best not to bring it up.

The ending of Breaking Bad - Too soon, still. Don't know when it won't be, but not now.

Divorce - Hilarious joke about your sister's crippling separation after 30 years of marriage, Uncle Jerry! We're now all allowed to hit you with a shovel.

Repulsion by weird food on the table - Just pass on the meat Jello. Everybody but the person who made it knows how weird it is.

Read more: Esquire's Official List of Thanksgiving Dinner Trigger Words - Esquire
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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.

 

How to Deal with In-Laws on Holidays ~ My father-in-law was a short guy named Billy, the kind of guy you'd describe as some sort of particularly affecting male animal — a badger sometimes, other times a rooster. Not William, or Bill. Billy. A traveling salesman for a company that manufactured the architecture that hangs over gas pumps. The guy knew every crossroad in Tennessee and Kentucky. He favored the thoughtless uniform of American maleness — golf shirt, khakis, dark blue socks, and non-lacing shoes he had saved a little money on. He gained and lost weight in a single eight-pound increment, so he always either had the extra weight or had just dropped it. I never would have described him as fat, nor was he skinny.

 

First time I met him he told a racist joke. Normally this would have led me to walk away, to call the guy a prick, and be done with him. But I was in his house, at the wild fringe of a Nashville subdivision, waiting out the brisket in his smoker on the Fourth of July. I wasn't much to brag on either, a bartender, who drove an old Volvo with no air-conditioning which my own father had given me in a pinch. I had a lousy haircut. And worse, I was trying to romance his daughter. I knew even then I'd marry her someday. So I quickly discovered the essential axiom of life with the in-laws: There is nowhere to go. You cannot walk away.

 

So I would hang with Billy. The lousy patterned pants, the dopey British hats, the big shiftless Cadillacs he prowled around in, the manner in which he'd toss an open supermarket freezer looking for the cheapest cut of whatever he was grilling, his sometimes petulant silences. I knew I would see both of my in-laws at holidays for the foreseeable future. I needed some rules for getting through intensely proximate Christmases, the dinner checks ungrabbed, clumsy political proddings over Thanksgiving turkey, breakfast plates of salty bacon the next morning, and the endless, repetitive jokes about Mr. Winces, the Titanic, and Bill Clinton's cigars. Somehow I came to really like the guy, because I had my rules.

 

1) Open your ears. This is pretty confounding, literally. It simply means listen whether you're listening or not. Hang tough with the jokes, the catchphrases, the stories. Let the in-law have the stage. Never show boredom. At best, you'll learn a little something about business, running PVC plumbing, Tyrone Power. At worst, you'll learn how to think of yourself as an actor playing the part of a lithium-dosed weekend inpatient on the ward.

 

2) Develop a routine. Ask about it the minute you arrive, or right after they cross the threshold of your home. Find something that always needs to be done — daily (a trip to the supermarket, the hardware store), or seasonally (the hunting of suitable pumpkins, the hanging of storm windows). Develop a mutual history in routine, one that tricks them into a sense that you've known each other longer than you actually have.

 

3) Find a good present and give it every time. When I finally could afford it, I gave Billy a golf hat every time I saw him. This became a collection he didn't mind showing people. Later I went with a dozen decent golf balls. He had his patterns, too. For a while he tried to give me ornate beer steins, which did not in any way become a collection for me. I tossed each and every one. Eventually, he got the idea. After that, he just started paying for our rounds of golf.

 

4) Retreat. Billy used to cook brisket on the smoker all day, every holiday. He did this just outside the door of his basement garage. I spent many summer afternoons watching that inscrutable cylinder from one of his lawn chairs, listening to tree frogs or whatever they were. I treated it like a job, like a young sailor put on watch, which kept me out of the ebb and flow of senior-citizen eccentricity.

 

5) Drink the beer you are given, without complaint. They gave it to you, after all.

 

6) Don't argue. I once had a tai chi teacher I liked enough to ask how the silent, slow form-changing done in the light of dawn could relate to a martial art. He told me that sometimes the best move was the one where you stepped away and let the opponent miss. Whatever. But the truth is, I learned that if I never resisted stupid political declarations, I heard fewer and fewer of them. Don't engage. Don't go blow-for-blow, in anything. In-laws are not your office buddies. I never gave them any shit.

 

7) Don't teach. Keep your "knowledge" to yourself. Your in-laws are older than you. If they don't know more, they should know better. If they haven't learned it by the time they get to you, then there is no hope.

 

8) Work. Insert air-conditioner window units. Rake the front yard. Make life easier for them, which will keep you out of the flow, cut down on the meaningless chatter, and make you a sort of hero.

 

9) When you are bored, or angry: read. The act looks self-possessed, and grants space. Here's the trick: take a book from their shelves. They will back off. Every adult respects an interest in books they love. It promises the possibility that you will somehow think they were right about something.

 

10) Don't whine about visiting. You have to. I never, not once, felt completely at home in my in-laws' house. I didn't like their aqua carpets, their Brady Bunch kitchen, the compensatory projection of their oversized deck, not the hauntingly empty basement. But I learned not to complain. It wasn't that hard. Everything with in-laws comes in passing: their oddness, their tics, their collections, their prejudices, and their high regard. Remind yourself: These two people made that person you love. Remember: It is truly temporary. And this: People die, divorces occur, years pass. Only one thing is certain: Some day all of it will be a story.

Okay, so we may not be able to launch a health care initiative, and we're getting fatter and slower by the day. But you know what? We fking rule at Christmas.

 

Christmas is the consumerist bacchanalia, bursting with orgasmic shop-‘til-you-drop revelry. It's the one holiday perfectly tailored to not only capitalism but the ideology of super-sized, bombastic displays of generosity and love-thy-neighbor, all of which can be conveniently forgotten about a week later, when the new year has rung, the afterglow has faded and we're left facing the long dark tea time of the soul that is January and the ensuing ass-end of winter's months with an eggnog headache and pile of credit card bills. But man, is it beautiful while it lasts.

Nowhere else is this better described, physically and metaphorically, than our fixation on larger-than-life, mine-is-bigger-than-yours phallic foliage representations. That's right, the Christmas tree. Thrusting forth from the ground in every metropolitan area, these beheaded behemoths take a page from the theology side of the holiday, giving their lives to stand tall and represent our seasonably appropriate love of fellow man, flooding our populace with pine-scented pheromones of consumerist holiday joy that help us to temporarily forgive each other's sins. And don't give us your Technicolor aluminum or plastic jobs, or floating frames. No, in America we want the real McCoy, crown jewels in a $3.4 billion industry ripped from a forest somewhere, an organic symbol of our national holiday virility.

And because this is America, it's all about the bragging rights. So whose is the biggest?

You'd be surprised.

New York: Standing firm in front of Rockefeller Center, the NYC tree weighs in at 12 tons and 75 years old, thursting upward to 76' tall.

Washington, D.C.: An Engelmann spruce from Northern Washington, the official tree of our nation's capitol is a towering 88'.

 

San Francisco: Keeping a mellow vibe while sitting on the dock of a bay, watching the time... Oh, you get it. Anyway, SF's tree is just 60' and chilling on Pier 39.

Milwaukee: The Midwest is a humble place, and, well, this year's 40' tall Colorado Blue Spruce is just that, though it is heavy with five thousand lights.

Los Angeles: Of course, LA takes things a little more seriously than their northern neighbors, especially when it comes to appearances and shape. Which is why they doled out around a $1000 a foot for Fashion Island's 90' beauty. Boston: Beantown's historic Faneuil Hall will be a-glow from 30 thousand lights enshrouding their 80' green monster.

 

Kansas City, Missouri: Down on Crown Center, they're getting down by putting up a 100' tree, which is then recycled into ornaments to fund next year's celebration.

Anthem, Arizona: All of these are small potatoes, however, mere seedlings, when compared to the giant that is being erected in an outlet mall in arid Anthem, Arizona. Shipped from the Shasta-Trinity forest in Northern California on a 75-foot flatbed, boasting a staggering three miles of LED lights and three thousand ornaments and bows, their 112 foot behemoth weighs twelve tons and is so big that, since sunlight couldn't filter all the way down to its base causing it to grow in a shape that didn't meet the expected aesthetics, neighboring trees were also uprooted and "plugged" into its stem with a series of glue and fastener-less cuts and wedges, nip-and-tucking it like a Beverly Hills soccer mom to achieve the desired voluptuous profile.

 

AND back to Los Angeles: Oh, you thought 112' was cool? Meh. Apparently, it's a battle of the outlets malls, and sunny SoCal ain't about to be outdone. The Citadel Outlets have gone and gotten their mittened mitts on a 115 footer from, where else, the Shasta Trinity forest. Twenty feet longer than a basketball court, they even topped 'er off with, apropos, the world's largest bow.

And the winner is... Couer d'Alene, Idaho. Way up north, they grow 'em big. 162 feet big, to be exact, which is so darn tall it takes 40 thousand LED lights and a ten-foot star to finish off the holiday vibes. The best part? It's a living tree, meaning that next year, it's still gonna be there, growing bigger and pumping out the kind of O2 only a towering photosynthesizing beast like this could.

 

But who holds the title for tallest ever?

There's some dispute, actually. According to the LA Times, the Guinness record is held by a 221' Douglas Fir that loomed over Seattle's Northgate Shopping Mall way back in 1950, though a tree farm owner from New York calls bullshit on this, claiming it was actually assembled from trees laid end-to-end to shape it and not a single unit. He believes he was the grower/installer of the true top of the tree triangle, a 135-foot needle-y pole of festiveness that stood over Six Fags in Vallejo, California in 2007.

 

To the average citizen, it matters not.

Christmas is, literally by design, everyone's favorite time of year. Kids love presents, parents at least pretend to love thy neighbors, and it's a month or two -- or three, depending on how frisky Madison Avenue is feeling -- where we can all embrace the communal idealism of one big happy nuclear family before the ultimate fallout that happens when you get too many people of the same bloodline in the same place and mix in a few gallons of spiked punch. It's the ultimate joy-spewing annual climax of the consumer culture creation myth, and, for those few months, faux or not, there's nothing better. Bring on the fat men in the suits.

Read more: In Search of the Tallest Christmas Tree in America - Esquire
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