Being the only one in your family who speaks up about a problem makes holidays awkward. It can also make them healthier.

Families often run on quiet agreements about what does not get mentioned, and those agreements can hold for years. Name the thing and you briefly become the disruption, even though the problem was doing the disrupting all along. That inversion is the real cost of speaking, and it is worth knowing about in advance. It does not mean you were wrong to speak, and it does not guarantee anything changes.

If you want to say it, say it once, calmly, to one person rather than to a table. You are not responsible for repairing the whole family by yourself.