Does Thanksgiving Make People Crazy?

People have truly difficult problems but this is not one of them. Nevertheless Reddit may have advice to this overly long question.

My wife and I have been socializing with another couple and a single person for about 5 or 6 years with a third couple joining us for two years. We all get along very well, have great times together, tell funny stories and our viewpoints are pretty aligned. We get together every month or so for dinner out, museums, older folks stuff because we are older folks. We see the single person more often because he is a cinemaphile and likes the new wave French movies as we do. He organizes this and the others rarely (never?) join us for dinner and a movie.

One couple does Thanksgiving every year and for three of the last four or five years we have been invited. We were away the other years. They do most of the work but we bring a few bottles of good wine, a dish and lots of clean up. Last year I did the carving. About a month ago I coordinated a trip into the city with dinner after which everyone totally enjoyed and commented effusively upon. We were pretty shocked and mortified when we were not invited for their Thanksgiving this year. Does Thanksgiving make people crazy? Is this viewpoint too transactional?

Maybe we have been remiss since we have never invited the entire group over for dinner but since everyone eats differently (meat,, no meat, no pasta, gluten free, etc.etc.) t's hard to please. There are enough dishes at Tgiving so it's no problem. Everyone travels making scheduling difficult. The third couple has an open house a few times a year. The single person does not cook dinners either. We by plan expeditions which means finding a date, time, logistics, planning for 7 people a number of times per year although we are not the only ones who do this.

This is not a discuss your issues kind of group. Funny you can ask someone you don't really know what they are doing for Thanksgiving but we can't ask each other in this group, the topic is taboo. One year we had Thanksgiving and we were completely surprized when the single was not there; he was elsewhere. The Thanksgiving invite is mostly no-go zone. The last time we saw the single he asked us if we were going to the tgiving couple's, I said "No we weren't invited, we must be on their shitlist." He said "I hardly think so." I thought long and hard about exactly how he asked "What are you doing for tgiving" means he knew we weren't invited, asking as he did means he did not. Smiley would get this too.

So what's going on and what to do? I'm from NJ and my first reaction is conclude we have been snubbed and snub them back harder. I have a suspicion we were replaced by the third couple which is real snubbery if you ask me. As I said this is not a ask questions group regarding this topic, so the answer would probably be empty blather followed by total cut off without the satisfaction of telling them f-you. One annoying thing is that we did not realize we were not invited till too late for us to plan travel to family or elsewhere, book a nice hotel and dinner or invite others to our place for tgiving. It seems reasonable to ask the Tgiving couple to let us know their plans early enough so we can do something else.

My opinion is that friends don't do this to one another and never in a million years would we invite just a subset of this group to anything.

One other thing, after the expedition into the city the tgiving couple lost their car keys. We missed the call until we were home and offered to come pick them up but they ubered it. I doubt anyone could be so suspicious and petty that they blamed us for this.

What to do now? There is a restaurant dinner engagement coming up next week. Keep in mind except the Thanksgiving Craziness at we really like everyone, they are important to us and we greatly enjoy spending tgiving with them but the invite thing causes lots of angst. Alternatives:

- do nothing, this is my wife's advice so is likely the wisest

- skip the restaurant with or without telling them anything, they will figure it out. Very passive aggressive and may or may not result in more snubbery

- ask what's up, telling them how we feel - this will surely lead to more perhaps total snubbery and possibly verbal conflict

- ask if there is something we have done or said unintentionally to offend

- ask neutrally, "let us know early if you plan on snubbing us again this year so we can go to visit family, Barbados, Paris or Tahiti", Is this reasonable? It's pretty funny though.

- go to the upcoming event but stop organizing anything with them. It's fun to do these things but work. It probably won't make any difference. Maybe just do things with the single person who we have known the longest.

- double down and offer to do Thanksgiving next year or figure out how to do dinner or have everyone over for drinks and snacks before going out to dinner. Will this end my perceived snubbing? - I doubt it. I assume Thanksgiving is their thing but maybe they are tired of it. It may be hard for them to give up control though.

One funny thing is that one of the not-Thanksgiving couple includes a psychologist so just like the biggest traffic jams are when a cop is directing traffic, you find a psychologist where there is the biggest social mess.