Don’t cancel Thanksgiving yet.

Thursday may seem like it’s going to be an official day for family civil wars. The New York Times reports that people are changing their plans in order to avoid having to sit across the table from people who voted differently for them.

WNYC, New York’s public radio station, is taking nightly calls from people who can’t bear to spend the holidays with their racist extended families.

The Washington Post reports that people are dividing up the holidays into different hours of dining so as to separate the different political factions within the same clans.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Maybe it sounds old-fashioned, but we actually don’t need to talk about politics at the dinner table this week. (And I say this as a journalist, who is married to another journalist, whose parents both have PhDs in political science and whose brother-in-law is a rabbi.)

We’ve already given up religion. These days, even many evangelical Christians tend to think proselytization is kind of déclassé.

But politics? Politics has become everything. It has sucked up all the air in the room. When my husband and I sat down at a fund-raising dinner a few weeks ago, a woman whom we barely knew yelled from across the table: “So who are you voting for?”

Really? Is this your opening bid for polite conversation?

For some, though, the time for polite conversation has passed. They believe that holding back is actually a sign of hypocrisy or that you are suffering from some kind of repression. In our therapeutic age, everything must be on the table.

“It’s never not the time to start a fight about this,” Louis Virtel, a gay television writer in Los Angeles, told the Washington Post. “I can’t pretend . . . that my entire lifestyle is not compromised by them voting against what I am.”

Never mind that of all the prejudices Donald Trump could possibly be accused of, being anti-gay seems the least supported by evidence — he thinks gay marriage should remain legal and he specifically mentioned LGBT rights at the Republican convention; no one is asking Virtel or anyone else to “pretend” anything.

Thanksgiving dinner is not a session with your shrink; it’s not Confession; and it’s not testimony under oath. There’s no obligation to say everything on your mind.

There are those who believe a civil political discussion is still possible at the dinner table. Emily Yoffe, who used to write the Dear Prudence column for Slate, advises that those who want to undertake such a project “think of it as being a pollster. This is a chance to explore the thoughts of people who see the world in radically different terms from you. That’s valuable, if you can keep an open mind and limit your condemnation.”

She warns that “if the conversation degenerates into hectoring or insults, someone has to tap on a glass and say something like, ‘We’re all exhausted from the past year. Let’s take a break.’?”

My guess is that by then it will be too late. People have no practice containing their political views. From our religious institutions to the workplace to social media to Broadway plays, it seems there is no venue where people refrain from engaging in political rants. And these rants are rarely designed to persuade anyone, let alone better understand the other side. They are like performance art intended to earn plaudits from those who already agree.

In order to have a politically difficult discussion with someone else, it actually helps to start from a place of common ground. Whether that is a shared appreciation of pies or strategies for getting toddlers to sleep through the night or home-improvement dreams or real-estate prices or nostalgia for video games of the 1980s or 19th century Russian novels, there really are plenty of topics besides the weather to engage us.

And just as a reminder, there’s nothing wrong with a little small talk. A study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 found that commuters who were prompted to initiate conversations with strangers reported “significantly more positive” commutes than those who didn’t speak to others. Human interaction — even with those who voted differently — can make life more pleasant.

And yes, a little wine never hurts.

Naomi Schaefer Riley is a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum.