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The men of my admittedly non-Midwestern acquaintance do have a common language. Mostly, it has to do with big-screen movies involving CGI apes or robots. The price of gasoline is also a unifying theme.
However, at family holiday dinners there is no need to preserve the traditional gender divide. If Garrison Keillor is bored, he should go in the kitchen and offer to cut up some carrots, wash some pots, scrub a counter or look after some kids or dogs. For extra credit, he could even plan ahead and arrange to cook some part of the meal himself.
He can also expend his free time in offering praise, gratitude and encouragement to the people who do all these things. As he must surely know by now, the absence of such encouragement and thanks causes strong women to crack, suddenly hurling a turkey platter through the TV screen or putting their feet down and declaring they will order takeout.
Wow - give him a break you hostile people. This was mostly a nostalgic look at how his Christmas dinners used to be, not a political treatise on sex roles in the home. Further, if you have Old People in your family, just try keeping the Old Men from gathering in the living room and the Old Women from congregating in the kitchen, no matter how liberated your personal household is.
