How to Survive Thanksgiving Dinner with Your In-laws

If you’re like most people, you look forward to Thanksgiving dinner with your spouse’s parents the way a newly adopted puppy looks forward to a mysterious visit to the vet: you’d like to think something exciting is in store, but deep down you suspect you’re in for a painful experience. Here’s a quick guide to making it through the holiday with your sanity (and your marriage) intact.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

1. Make a good impression. No handshake is too firm, and no hug is too tender, when your in-laws greet you at the door. Be sure to make all the usual inquiries about your mother-in-law’s health, your father-in-law’s golf score, the latest news of the relative about whom No One Speaks except at big family holidays. Stretch this part of the evening out for as long as is humanly possible.

2. Don’t talk about your personal life. After you’ve made it through the initial pleasantries, you’ll need something to discuss for the next three or four hours. Avoid any subject (work, mortgage payments, your son’s suspension from private school) that might reflect badly on your spouse in the eyes of your father or mother, or, for that matter, anyone they might happen to talk to over the next six months.

3. Don’t talk about politics. Whether the results of the recent election made you gloat with glee or want to lock yourself in the closet, the odds are that if you bring the subject up with your in-laws, one of them will accuse you of a) gloating too much; b) not gloating enough; or c) being such a sloppy housecleaner that who’d want to lock themselves in a closet like that, anyway? Such a disgrace.

4. Avoid talking about football. If you’re a guy, you’ve probably bought into the male-bonding fantasy that if you watch (or even discuss) the day’s NFL games with your father-in-law, he’ll stop squinting at you sideways and start to think you’re a regular Joe. No. What will actually happen is that your father-in-law will suspect you of faking it, and try to trip you up with arcane football trivia, or he will disapprove of the team you’re rooting for (or pretending to be rooting) and everything it represents. So football is definitely out.

5. Don’t talk about anything at all. You’ll have to arrange this with your spouse beforehand, but it’s amazing what last-minute oral surgery or a bad case of laryngitis can do to minimize friction with your in-laws. Think of it as like being a senatorial candidate: if you don’t say anything, you won’t say anything unintentionally stupid, but if you try to be friendly and outgoing you’re bound to stick your foot in it (and may even wind up on YouTube, if your mom-in-law has learned how to use that videocamera you gave her last Christmas).