From Garrison Keillor's "Decoding Christmas Dinner" today in Salon:
The men who gather in the living room on Christmas this year don't have the easy common language that my uncles had. In Minnesota, you have the weather for conversation, but that's only good for an hour or so. Sports is not the common ground it used to be; nobody has the time to be a fan and develop the expertise that makes arguments possible. There's politics, of course, but that's a topic for pontificating and harrumphing, which isn't the same as conversation. We can compare laptops and cellphones and iPods, I guess, but that's really about money, which is not a fit topic. To talk about our children is rather delicate, comparisons are inevitable, and if your child is in advanced kindergarten, the French-immersion one, and mine is still figuring out shapes and colors, it can be painful. Theology is treacherous ground, and we don't discuss sex, and around Christmas we try to avoid vicious gossip, so what's left? Cars. But you can't fix cars yourself anymore unless you've been to car college, and the loyalties aren't so strong as my dad's feelings for Fords.
So we gaze out the window and we say things like, "I was reading a column in the paper today about men not having a common language anymore." Oh, really. Who wrote that? "I forget." Oh. End of discussion.
Well, there's always real estate.