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This is exactly my experience, but with sports! I don't enjoy watching sports, I don't care who wins or loses, but I know that 90% of the discussion at Thanksgiving will revolve around the Notre Dame football games so I have to choose to either watch (the highlights) or be utterly out of the conversation loop.
This is not a new problem. I fully suspect that it's what drove the earlier generation to watch the nightly news, since otherwise you're out of the water-cooler chit-chat loop. (How far back do I have to go for a water-cooler chit-chat to still be a thing? 90's?)
Holy crap I just realized I'm in a sportsless filter bubble. I have literally never had a holiday discussion regarding the outcome of sports games. None of my immediate family care much about sports. My dad sometimes watches football, but mostly casually, and none of the rest of us do so what would there be a discussion about. And my extended family also don't watch sports except maybe occasionally. And I suppose this is strongly correlated, because the fact that my grandpa didn't care about sports influenced his children to not care about sports so it makes sense that all of them collectively don't care, which in turn is a component of why I don't care.
But also I spent several thanksgivings at a friend's extended family when I was away at college, and they didn't talk about sports. But my friend was a big nerd, nonrandomly because he was friends with me.
But also I recently got married and none of my in-laws care about sports. Again, this is non-random because I married a big nerd and while her family are not exclusively nerds, they're not sports people.
To be clear, there are a lot of things they talk about on the more normie side that I don't really care about: tractors and hunting and broadway and dogs. But sports is not on the menu, and I never really considered that this wasn't just luck, but also indirect correlations: non-sports people are more likely to be relatives of non-sports people.
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A good friend of mine started following college (SEC) football in his mid teens so that he could immediately bond with pretty much anyone (he was a bit of a politician a s eventually went into business). He had no real interest in it before.
When he died at age 48, his wife (who had known only the last five or so years of his life) had a Bama football-themed wake for him, where people were wearing crimson and white and houndstooth and signing Roll Tide etc. in the memory book.
It was an odd feeling for me, having known him almost all his life. Maybe he would have liked it? I kept this all to myself.
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Before 1890s, probably. It sounded like everyone was reading Dickens for water cooler chit chat reasons.
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