A Recipe for Getting Along with Family at Christmas

If you suspect that America is increasingly polarized, you are not alone. A Gallup Poll released in September of this year found that 

A record-high 80% of U.S. adults believe Americans are greatly divided on the most important values, while 18% believe the country is united. The percentage seeing the nation as divided has ticked up from 77% the last time Gallup asked the question in 2016. It is more than 10 percentage points higher than in prior 2004 and 2012 measures.

This Christmas season, the stockings are particularly stuffed with things about which to disagree. To sample a few: The 2024 election—and, if you must, the 2020 election, January 6, and so forth; the president-elect’s cabinet choices; the current president’s pardons; the Israel-Hamas war; raw milk in the grocery store and fluoride in the water; climate change; and above all, Taylor Swift. (I mean, should she really have that level of popularity?) Throw in aggravating factors like a woke sensitivity or a QAnon proclivity, and you have a tinderbox ready to ignite at the family Christmas party.

To make matters worse, American society in the wake of the 1960s tends to privilege qualities such as passion, commitment, and autonomy over virtues such as civility, courtesy, and restraint. The result is folks who are full of sound and fury and who lack the skills required for mature, respectful, and charitable disputation.

So short of making your Christmas guests take a crash course in logic and manners before passing under the mistletoe, what do you do? You can do what St. Thomas More does in his masterpiece Utopia. More is a character in his own work, and when he finishes hearing a long and laudatory account of the island of Utopia from his dubious interlocutor Raphael Hythloday (whose name means “Peddler of Nonsense”), he is not impressed. The Utopian way of life, More concludes, is “absolutely absurd”—an abomination that eliminates “all nobility, magnificence, splendor, and majesty.” But More does not disclose his opinion to Hythloday because “I knew he was worn out from speaking, and I was not certain that he could endure to be disagreed with, especially when I remembered the way he had reproached certain people.”

More, in other words, realizes that Hythloday is thin-skinned, even though ironically Hythloday had previously launched into a diatribe against thin-skinned people. But rather than call Hythloday out on his hypocrisy, More takes a different tack: “I praised the Utopian way of life and his speech, took him by the hand, and led him in to dinner, but only after saying that there would come another time for us to think about these same matters more deeply and to discuss them with him more fully, and wished that that would happen someday!”

More praised him, deferred the tough questions, and led him in to dinner. Moreover, I am struck by the detail of More taking Hythloday’s hand. The two adult men had just met, and yet More reaches out to this stranger with the odious opinions in friendship.

For despite the rancor that can happen at the family dinner table, one should never underestimate the power of a shared meal. Our Lord knew what he was doing when he made his most intimate act of self-offering a banquet, for even on the natural level communal dining fosters communion among its participants. Study after study has shown how the family dinner increases the mental health and intellectual capacity of children, and how it enhances team performance even among non-related persons, such as firefighters.

And a drink doesn’t hurt either. As Ogden Nash observes in his short poem “Reflections on Ice-Breaking”:

Candy 
Is dandy
But liquor
Is quicker.

Granted, a surfeit of such icebreakers could ignite that tinderbox, but in moderation, wassailing fans good cheer. I recommend the following since it is not only delicious but involves doing something that everyone can agree is fun: burning stuff indoors.

Adonai’s Smoking Rosemary Old Fashioned

• 2 oz. Redemption Rye Whiskey
• 2–3 tsp. simple syrup
• 2 dashes Angostura bitters
• 1 sprig of dried rosemary (if you only have fresh rosemary, throw it in the oven for 4–5 minutes at 350°F)
• Luxardo Maraschino or Toschi Amarena black cherry

Build whiskey, simple syrup, bitters, and cherry in an old-fashioned glass filled with ice and stir. Take the rosemary and light it on fire. Hold it directly over the glass without putting it in, and cover it with a metal shaker, sealing the glass with the shaker. Count to ten: The flame will go out and the drink will be infused with a strong smoky flavor. Remove the shaker and burnt rosemary and watch the smoke sinuously wind its way out of the glass.

Merry Christmas!

Michael P. Foley is a Professor of Patristics at Baylor University and the author of Drinking with Saint Nick: Christmas Cocktails for Saints and Sinners and Why We Kiss under the Mistletoe: Christmas Traditions Explained.

Image courtesy of the National Museum of Wales. Image edited.