The Holidays Suck, But I Have a Solution: Party Referees

By this time, most of us have everything ready to go for the Christmas. You have bought all the crap, you have purchased the ham, the family is in town and people have moved into your home.

You finally sit down for a holiday meal with the loved ones, and it starts. The arguing and the fighting. This is because of therapy -- that is my theory. Because we have all either been in therapy or been lectured by someone who has, we have learned some things. We have learned that everyone is entitled to their opinion, and we need to validate it.

That is all well and good, but it clouds the main issue -- in every argument there is someone that is right and someone that is wrong. That never gets addressed anymore. It's either a never-ending screaming match or you close with an unsatisfying "agree to disagree."

This has to stop, and I know how to do it, all the while creating jobs. You have party referees.

You hire an independent third party to moderate your holidays. They throw actual flags. They throw a flag when the habitual line-stepper brings up an out of bounds topic. They throw flags on unnecessary name calling. They throw flags on someone who has run out of things to say and just repeats the same thing over and over, and most important of all, they determine a winner in every argument. It's either we do this or continually get nowhere.

Maybe I am wrong. Maybe it is the limited shapes of our dinner tables that makes us crazy. You sit in circles, squares and rectangles your whole life, and your bound to yearn for a rhombus shaped table every once in a while.

P.S. "Habitual line-stepper" is courtesy of the great Charlie Murphy.