14 topics to avoid like the plague this Christmas Day

Want to enjoy a harmonious Christmas with relatives but somehow fail every year on that front? Try sticking to this simple conversational guide, by Hayden Donnell, and watch the conviviality and cheer unfold.

If you’ve put in the work, it might be tempting to believe this will be the family Christmas to run without incident. Perhaps childhood traumas have faded with time and therapy. Age might have humbled you, and made you more accepting of the idea you could be wrong. You may think, in your enlightenment, that you’ll be able to endure your maddening relatives; to shrug off their annoying opinions and resist the urge to bicker with your hateful cousins about current events.

Take it from 1News: hubris will be your downfall. Just as there are no atheists in foxholes, there are no Zen people on the battlefield of Christmas. As much as you may believe you can keep things civil, it’s a fool’s errand. The only failsafe way to avoid conflict is to bottle your feelings, and clamp down on your real thoughts. That’s the New Zealand way, and this December, we’re here to help, with a list of topics to stay away from in order to keep the festive season festive

Yes, it got rid of diphtheria. No, nobody wants to hear about how amazing that was again.

What a nightmare. Uncle Gary will be an absolute terror when it comes to discussing politics.

Quantum physics, with its delightful array of protons and neutrons, may seem like a pleasant diversion from the horrors of politics. Nothing could be further from the truth. Few things in history have set smart people’s teeth on edge like the mysteriousness of the quantum realm.

It’s the weirdness that annoys them. Quantum physics is a mess of mind-boggling discoveries. Particles appear to change their behaviour in response to being observed. The universe might not be 100 percent real. There are quarks. Einstein famously grumbled over its observations, saying “God does not play dice with the universe” in protest at the apparent randomness of the subatomic world, and calling quantum entanglement “spooky action at a distance”. If this topic is confusing enough to exasperate the most intelligent man of all time, it’s unlikely your family possesses the genius necessary to navigate it without suffering a collective nervous breakdown.

Don’t talk about the atoms that make up the Sky Tower. But don’t talk about the actual Sky Tower or the city spread out under its watchful gaze either. Aucklanders get annoyed at Auckland. Everyone else gets annoyed at Aucklanders. This Christmas it’s safer to take after the designers of almost every world map and pretend the country’s largest city doesn’t exist.

So you’ve had a wine or two, and you’re thinking "maybe it’s time to raise the question of whether Jesus was created by God the Father, or was always one with Him in time and substance". Think again. When the Council of Nicea debated this point in AD325, the arguing went on for months. At one point the back-and-forth became so heated that a bishop wandered over and slapped a speaker in the face. The slapper? None other than Saint Nicholas himself.

If this debate is noxious enough to get a guy smacked about by Santa Claus, what hope does your family have of getting through it unscathed? Unless you want to spend the rest of your summer brawling over the Lord’s true nature, it’s best to opt for another conversational gambit.

The topic of whether Jesus is both begotten of and self-same with God is off the table. But – you might think – surely a discussion of church politics would be an interesting way to fill the gaps between mouthfuls of curry puffs? What about a quick dip into the matter of whether Pope Leo IX was justified in excommunicating the Patriarch of Constantinople, Michael Cerularius?

If you find yourself musing along these lines, repent. Cerularius’ excommunication in 1054 split the Catholic church in two, dividing it into the Roman and Eastern Orthodox factions in an event known as the Great Schism. Millions of people have been set at odds from each other for centuries because of Pope Leo IX and Cerularius. Don’t let your family be their next victim.

It might actually be best to avoid religion altogether.

Yes, it got rid of polio. No, nobody wants to hear about how great it is that kids these days don’t have to spend their childhoods in an Iron Lung.

This is the subject of a territorial dispute between Britain and Argentina. Don’t get involved.

This is the subject of a territorial dispute between Britain and Argentina. Don’t get involved.

This is the subject of a territorial dispute between Britain, Argentina, and Chile. Discuss it, but only with caution.

There is a 26000-word Wikipedia article devoted to conflicts caused by tax. Don’t let ‘Your family Christmas 2023’ follow in the footsteps of ‘The Bolotnikov rebellion, 1606’.

It’s true, a bevy of evidence points to the Titanic having been switched with its sister ship the Olympic as part of an insurance scam by its owner White Star Line. But many people are hugely attached to the narrative presented by James’ Cameron’s 1997 epic The Titanic, and Christmas isn’t the time to call people’s cherished but outdated and implausible beliefs into question.

Most of your regular conversational options are now off the table. You’re probably thinking of reverting to this classic low-stakes, light-hearted, topic. It’s a trap. Evolutionary theory suggests the chicken we know today is the result of a chicken-esque bird – or more accurately a proto-chicken – laying a fertilised egg containing a genetic mutation. The egg came first.

Evolution brings us back to the nature of humanity. That takes us to religion. Religion draws us into the fundamental makeup of the universe. That inevitably leads to a discussion of the quantum realm, which can only end with relatives shouting about God and dice and slapping you like Saint Nicholas at a rowdy church council meeting. At that point you may as well give up and talk politics with Uncle Gary. Maybe he voted TOP. But you should give him a chance.