The Family You Didn't Choose
The dinner is at their house this year. Your mother-in-law has opinions about how you're raising the kids, your brother-in-law has opinions about everything, and someone will find a way to bring up politics before the plates are cleared. You didn't pick these people. You picked one of them, and the rest came bundled in, non-negotiable, like a software update nobody asked for.
Epictetus knew something about roles chosen for you. Born a slave in the first century and lame from an injury, he had less say over his circumstances than almost anyone — and he built an entire philosophy on the difference between what we control and what we don't. In his Enchiridion, he offered a picture that fits a holiday table exactly: "Remember that you are an actor in a play, of such a kind as the author pleases to make it… For this is your business, to act well the character assigned you; to choose it is another's."
Read that twice, because it does two things at once. It frees you from an impossible job — you are not the casting director of your in-laws, and you will not be re-writing your brother-in-law's lines this Thanksgiving. And it hands you the one job that is actually yours: to play your part well. The overbearing mother, the loud relative, the sulking cousin — those are their parts to answer for. Your courtesy, your patience, your refusal to be baited: those are yours.
So here is the counsel. Walk in having quietly assigned yourself a character — the gracious one, the calm one, the one who asks a warm question and lets a jab sail past. When the provocation comes, and it will, you don't have to correct the other actor. You only have to keep hitting your own marks. Epictetus would tell you the goal was never to fix the cast. It was to leave the stage able to respect the person you played.
You can't choose them. You can always choose you.
You didn't write the play. Just act your part well, and let the others answer for theirs.