Spend Thanksgiving With Your Cool Friend's Cool Family
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Of all the great familial holidays, Thanksgiving is one of the most contentious. Even when you’re able to divorce the celebration from its heinous colonial origins, there are so many other obstacles to avoid: food shaming and body shaming and relationship-status shaming. Political conversation at the dinner table with extended family members who shut down any topics even tangentially nuanced with ham-fisted shouts of “fake news!” Inappropriate “characters” who become increasingly more inappropriate whilst intoxicated. The deep-seated feeling of obligation to keep quiet when things go south and unexpected social traps appear. As you age, these situations are supposed to become easier to traverse. Sometimes they don’t. They usually don’t. And when they don’t, allow me to make a petite suggestion: go to your cool friend’s cool parents’s house for the holiday.