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Maria Cassano, a 34-year-old writer from Long Island, said her father helped cook, clean and raise her children, but it was her mother who made each holiday magical.
“On Christmas Eve, there was a four-course Italian meal on a mahogany table, and the next morning, countless Toys R Us boxes surrounded the tree,” she wrote in a recent Medium post. “At some point I realized it wasn’t a jolly old man on a flying sleigh. It was my mother.”
Her mother never complained, Cassano said, but women are now realizing that the magic of Christmas is less about magic and more about women’s invisible, unpaid efforts.
When women return home after a long day at work, they work a “second shift” to do equally demanding work. According to Brigid Schulte, author of Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time and director of the Better Life Lab at the think tank New America, we spend a third of our time on vacation.
Schulte popularized the term to describe how women are tasked with creating “holiday magic” every year, from Thanksgiving to New Year’s Day.
“Women are traditionally expected to take time off and do the kinship job of helping to keep family bonds strong and creating the magic of the moment,” Schulte said in a 2014 interview.
Women, not Santas, are the ones who create the real magic
This holiday season, people on social media praised the “real magic makers” who wipe baseboards, cook turkeys and manage all the logistical hurdles. Some are calling this “mother recognition,” using hashtags like #HolidayMagic and #WomenWhoCarryTheSeason. In other words, it is the mother who created all the happy holiday memories.
Creating holiday magic takes a lot of work. A USA TODAY/Peacock survey released after the November release of Peacock’s series “All Her Faults,” which depicts the invisible labor of mothers, found that about 43% of women say they feel burnt out or mentally exhausted because they feel such feelings more than a third of the time every day.
“In most families, women do two-thirds of the household chores, whether they work outside the home or not,” said Eve Rodsky, author of “Fair Play: A Game-Changing Solution for When You Have Too To Do (and More Life to Live).”
Rodsky said research shows that women take on more of the household labor in order to create magical memories during the holidays.
Kristen Wiig’s sketch on “Saturday Night Live” in 2020 suggested a growing sense of uneven dissatisfaction with the burden of holiday responsibilities.
On Christmas morning, while her husband and two children rapped about the endless gifts they received, including an autographed baseball bat, a telescope, a drum set, a pizza oven, a drone, a laptop, and a pinball machine, Wiig wore a robe that was 40 percent off, an empty stocking, and burned her arm in a hot oven. The dog is also given multiple gifts (including a robe).
This year, Hollywood captured that vibe with Amazon MGM Studios’ “Oh. What. Fun.” The film tells the story of Michelle Pfeiffer, a Christmas-obsessed Houston housewife who feels unappreciated after months of preparing for the holiday and runs off on a road trip alone.
“Women are realizing that having it all means doing it all, but I don’t know if that’s the contract they signed,” Rodsky said.
How did women get the holiday shift?
In the 17th and 18th centuries, men typically organized holiday events that were a time to connect with neighbors rather than family, said Ellen Taaffe, a clinical associate professor at the Kellogg School of Management and author of “The Mirrored Door.”
In the 19th century, social and business ties were separated as men assumed the role of breadwinners and women became responsible for “kinship maintenance,” that is, the mental labor of managing connections and communications.
“The combination of caring for relatives and the unpaid domestic work that women have always been expected to do can make the holidays special, memorable, and extremely stressful,” Taaffe wrote in a LinkedIn post.
Women report higher stress levels around the holidays than men. Studies have shown that the task of managing other people’s emotions around the holidays can have a negative impact on women’s mental health.
The pressure only mounts, Cassano said, with the barrage of Hallmark holiday movies and TV ads featuring picture-perfect families in matching pajamas.
“I still make Butter Crunch from scratch and take it with me everywhere I go. It’s just a small gesture to make people feel appreciated and valued,” she said. “It’s a full-time job on top of a full-time job, so it’s very tiring.”
Tips on how to quit everything
Cassano offers some simple tips to make your vacation more manageable.
keep it simple. Don’t mop the baseboards, wrap all the gifts, or cook meals from scratch.
Redistribution. Don’t take it all on yourself. Divide the workload based on what each person does and enjoys.
hire help. Get cleaning services. Dinner catering.
Please take credit. “Stop giving credit for your labor to Santa, God, Jesus, or the Christmas Spirit,” Cassano said. “If someone compliments you on your meal, decorations, or gift, don’t deflect by saying, ‘Well, it wasn’t that big of a deal.’ Take ownership of your efforts. Say, ‘Thank you.’ I worked really hard on this. ”
