Ah yes, the holidays. Time to celebrate, revel in the season…and put your relaxation exercises to the test in the form of annoying relatives who might share your grandma but not your dogma.
What to do? Well, besides drinking too much and resorting to name-calling, you could actually take it upon yourself to educate the skeptics among you. No, really.

I have family members (identifying names and characteristics will be conveniently left out in order to avoid spending holidays alone with the punch bowl and reruns of It’s a Wonderful Life) who insist that climate change is simply the “natural cycle” and that living green is, therefore, unnecessary and…well…inconvenient.

And though I’ve inundated said family members with enough peer-reviewed climate research to earn me an honorary PhD (or at least a hand-written ‘thank-you’ from Al Gore and David Suzuki), they remain firm in their conviction that I’m – ahem – woefully misinformed at best and brainwashed at worst.

Sierra Club recognizes my pain. And has kindly come up with the Holiday Survival Guide. Within you will find appropriate answers and easy talking points to not only educate but entertain. What’s more, your blood pressure will remain in check because you won’t allow yourself to become emotionally engaged in verbal sparring with anyone who’s IQ seems inversely proportional to the rising temperatures. Oops! See how hard it is not to fall into ad hominem attacks?

Better luck to you, dear readers, in your attempts to not only inform your relatives of the crisis of climate change, but actually enjoy a family get-together. No easy task…