LITTLE ROCK — Ah, Thanksgiving. A little turkey, some cranberry mold, maybe apple pie with ice cream, some football on TV. Getting together with the cousins. Catching up beside the fire. Togetherness.
On second thought: This was an election year — things could get ugly for some families.
“The Thanksgiving table will be a battleground,” said Andrew Marshall, 34, of Quincy, Mass.
Like many extended families across the country, Marshall’s includes Democrats and Republicans, conservatives, liberals and independents. And so, like many families that count both red and blue voters in their ranks, they’re expecting fireworks.
Things had already gotten so bad on Facebook, the family had to ban political banter.
“It was getting brutal,” said Marshall.
And now, it will all play out in person. In this family, the older generation is more liberal, the younger more conservative. So Marshall, a conservative, particularly expects friction with his aunt, Anne Brennan, 57.
“She firmly believes in what she believes in, and we’ll go head to head with it,” he said.
As for Brennan, she’s looking on the bright side: the wine they’ll drink, even as Marshall frets that “the wine just amplifies it.”
But the Marshalls seem to be relishing the occasion. Not so the Davidson family in Alabama.
In fact, things have gotten so tense over politics between Brian Davidson, a 40-year-old attorney in Helena, and his father, 130 miles away in Russellville, that they’ve decided to forgo their usual gathering.
“We’re not even going,” said Davidson, who voted for Barack Obama and describes his father as “a little to the right of Glenn Beck.” Better to skip this one, he said, than suffer “a nonrecoverable blowup.”
Each Thanksgiving, Davidson typically loads up his family and makes the 130-mile drive to his parents’ house. This year, Davidson will take the children to wife Kim’s family instead, but even that could be tricky: They are conservative as well. So the couple will try to avoid any topics that could lead, they say, to “an Obama rant” around the table.
“Anything can cause it,” Davidson said. “We’re just going to suck it up.”
For some families, it’s not necessarily the presidential race that divided them. The Cox family in Colorado has long been split over the legalization of marijuana — ever since Diane Cox first caught her son, David, trying to smoke the drug when he was 14.
David Cox, now 31 and a peach farmer in Palisade, Colo., has volunteered for years on efforts to legalize marijuana. Diane Cox, meanwhile, has spearheaded several successful protests to ban medical marijuana dispensaries in nearby towns.
Colorado’s recent vote to legalize marijuana for recreational use again divided mother and son, who served as regional coordinator for the legalization campaign.
Discussion of the vote is likely at the family Thanksgiving, but David Cox doesn’t seem too worried.
“I don’t think awkward’s the proper term. The proper term is more, dissentious,” he said with a chuckle.
In Minnesota, the issue dividing Jake Loesch’s family is same-sex marriage. Voters there defeated a proposed amendment that would have banned same-sex marriage in the state, and Loesch, 24, of St. Paul, was deputy communications director for Minnesotans United for All Families — a group that fought the gay-marriage ban.
Loesch is a conservative, like his huge family. He had difficult conversations with some aunts, uncles and grandparents when he took his recent job, and as the political season heated up, he tried increasingly to avoid the subject: “Having those conversations is healthy for the political process, but sometimes, when it’s with family, it can be really, really hard.”
But he found common ground with his grandmother, who is 85. She disagreed with his stance, but after the election, she congratulated him on Facebook.
“Our family is very understanding of everybody’s opinions,” said his grandmother, Bunny Arseneau. “We know where everybody stands because we’re a very open family. Your opinion is your opinion and we respect you for it.”
And so, Loesch said, he is hoping for the best at Thanksgiving — after all, they’re still family.
“My father was of the old school. You never leave the house mad at each other, and you never go to sleep mad at each other,” said Arseneau.
Information for this article was contributed from Minneapolis by Amy Forliti, from Boston by Bridget Murphy, from Helena, Ala., by Jay Reeves and from Denver by Kristen Wyatt of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 3 on 11/22/2012