Holiday dinners has never been without their conflicts. Old wounds open up, rivalries flare up and individuals try to navigate the bumpy terrain by biting their tongues as best they can. But this year will be harder than usual, according to the New York Times, as fallout from the presidential election continues to enflame the nation to the point where some families just aren’t up to breaking bread with those who voted for the opposite party.
Matthew Horn, a software engineer from Boulder, Colo., canceled Christmas plans with his family in Texas. Nancy Sundin, a social worker in Spokane, Wash., has called off Thanksgiving with her mother and brother. Ruth Dorancy, a software designer in Chicago, decided to move her wedding so that her fiancé’s grandmother and aunt, strong Trump supporters from Florida, could not attend.
The election is over, but the repercussions in people’s lives may be just beginning as families across the United States contemplate uncomfortable holidays — or decide to bypass them — and relationships among friends, relatives and spouses are tested across the political divide.
This political agita wasn’t present in generations past, when the nation’s citizens shared more common backgrounds, according to a professor from Harvard.
“If you went to Thanksgiving dinner 50 years ago, you’d be very likely to have dinner with people from a different walk of life,” said Robert D. Putnam, a professor of public policy at Harvard and the author of “Our Kids,” an investigation of class divisions in America. “Today, there are far fewer people who are different from us around that table.”
For upper-middle-class families like his own, “every single person will have a college degree or currently be in college,” he said. “That class homogeneity was not true of my family a generation ago.”
If avoiding people doesn’t work, or trying to play nice at the table fails, you can always watch football on Thanksgiving. No one ever disagrees about that.