The moment we close the door on the last trick-or-treater, I don my Leigh Tucker festive pyjamas and deck the downstairs hall with a poinsettia that will be dead by December 8th.
But if I try to point to what it is I love so much about Christmas, it gets murky. Twinkly lights and John Williams? Being allowed to drink at odd hours and make things out of Lego? What it boils down to is a Pavlovian rush greater than the sum of pine needles and mulled wine.
This week, when I should have been hitting my festive stride, I hit burnout instead. And it was only December 2nd.
Most of us are familiar with the term “emotional labour”, coined by sociologist Arlie Hochschild, and its sister-wife the “mental load” – the invisible, endless, heavily gendered work of keeping family life upright. Christmas, as a great shimmering vibe running on childhood dreams, demands a Santa’s sack-load of both.
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Hochschild also gave us the “second shift”: the unpaid domestic and care work women take on after paid employment.
Feminist writer Laura Bates has proposed a “third shift” that kicks in at this time of year. This is the mental load of seasonal admin: planning social engagements, remembering thank-you notes, tracking Nativity plays and pantomime tickets, organising travel logistics and sleeping arrangements, keeping the whole sleigh on the road. It’s Christmas as occupation number three.
Modern festivities operate on the assumption that women have endless hours to pipe royal icing onto structurally sound gingerbread like a yuletide tradwife.
It’s a concept I immediately understand. This December 1st, I staggered through IKEA, dosed on Sudafed, cramming the car with unpronounceable Swedish flat-pack in the hope of transforming our attic into a guest room for my in-laws come Christmas Eve.
Driving home, my husband rang to say our son had fallen on the beach and broken his arm. That night I lay beside him as he cried - tired, sore, furious at being back in hospital yet again after 3½ of leukaemia treatment. When we learned he’d need surgery, I cried too. I’d planned to make this Christmas magical, to make up for the ones he lost: the pantos, the parties, the Decembers spent in hospital. But suddenly I was exhausted, ready to call the whole thing off.
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Maybe, instead of tidings of great joy, the holidays bring an endless list of things for women to do, as though the whole world needed to be wrapped and decorated. Call it the festive load, or the third shift: the disproportionate tasks needed to produce “the magic”.
Women – and it usually is women – buy the presents, decorate the house, shop for groceries, remember the teachers’ gifts and craft the faux-naif cards supposedly made by the toddlers they’re addressed from. We Google “no-spread cookies,” buy mercenary advent calendars and stage whimsical Elf on the Shelf tableaux to delight our credulous offspring. The whole production seems to happen by magic, helped along by a gang of elves and one big jolly man in a red suit. Trust a man to get the credit.
I recently taught Ruth Schwartz Cowan’s More Work for Mother to some design history students. Cowan argues that while industrialisation in the factory saved workers time and divided labour across many hands, progress in the home had the opposite effect: it placed the labour of the household onto one pair of hands - the mother’s. Technologies that promised to save time only raised expectations. Women didn’t invent these higher standards, Cowan notes. Instead, public health, medical science and consumer culture conspired to make them the project managers of an idealised domestic life.
Christmas has undergone a similar creep. A set of supposedly optional rituals – from Elf contortions to Christmas Eve Instagram posts to co-ordinated Late Late Toy Show pyjamas for the pets – have turned the season into a consumerist nightmare and an admin list to rival Santa’s. Christmas has its own labour-saving mythologies – online shopping, Pinterest “simple hacks”, pre-filled stockings and Elf-on-the-Shelf kits. These are all supposedly designed to make things easier, but instead simply inflate the season by raising the bar of what a “proper” Christmas should look like.
Cowan might as well have been writing about the festive season: every supposed shortcut simply widens the gap between “good enough” and “properly done”. Craft, DIY, budgeting, home economics, all of it bundled together like some festive transition year programme for high-functioning women.
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Maybe this is the real problem with Christmas: the emotional labour is more than simply logistics.
But I wonder how much of this is really necessary. Christmas was never magical because everything was perfect; it was magical because someone – a woman, usually – made it feel that way. And this year, lying beside my son as he cried, it struck me that what he wanted wasn’t an elf tableau or a deluxe advent calendar. He wanted comfort.
At the risk of sounding like a Working Title voiceover, maybe this year’s task is not to perfect Christmas but to pare it back – to recognise that the magic is not in doing but in being together. (And to share the load: my husband took over elf duties when it was clear they would languish with an Xbox controller. He also cooks the entire Christmas dinner every year and a turkey with all the trimmings simply appears on my plate on the 25th. It’s bliss.)
The rest – the cookies, the crafts, the co-ordinated pyjamas – is just toil and tinsel.
