It’s Not Santa Claus Who Makes the Holiday Magic Happen
It’s women’s invisible and often underappreciated labour
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In a new Christmas ad from British health retailer Boots, it’s Mrs Claus — played by actress Adjoa Andoh — who takes centre stage, working hard to prepare for the holidays with the help of a team of elves. Meanwhile, her husband, Santa, is shown snoozing peacefully in front of the fire.
The advert ends with Mrs Claus turning to the camera with a smirk and saying: ‘You thought it was all him?’.
Perhaps predictably, this reimagining of what goes on behind the scenes at Santa’s workshop stirred up quite a bit of controversy. Far-right group Britain First even launched a petition urging followers to boycott Boots over the ad, denouncing it as ‘woke’ and accusing it of undermining ‘traditional gender norms and the traditional Christian family.’
But the campaign doesn’t so much challenge gender norms as it highlights a broader truth about how they manifest during Christmas and other holidays — the holiday ‘magic’ we take for granted or attribute to mythical figures like Santa Claus, elves, the Easter Bunny or tooth fairies, is simply the result of the invisible and often underappreciated labour of women. That’s all the gift-purchasing and gift-wrapping and card-sending and food shopping and washing and scrubbing and meal planning and basting and stuffing and baking and house-decorating and so on.
And that’s just on top of the countless other responsibilities women are expected to shoulder for their families year-round.
When you stop and write it all down, the list is staggering.
But that’s precisely why it’s time to bring it into the light.
My mother typically started preparing for Christmas around mid-October.
She’d begin by making a list of everyone she needed to send cards or buy gifts for, jotting down ideas for each gift, and then she’d set off shopping for both. The next big task was coordinating the logistics for each day of the holiday season — where we’d spend them, who would join us, and what needed to be done in advance. Then came the food planning, more shopping, and finally, the cooking, baking, and decorating, which I helped with as much as I could or knew how.
It was during those weeks leading up to Christmas that I’d frequently find my mother dozing off in the armchair at the end of the day, a half-finished cup of soothing herbal tea sitting on the table beside her.
I honestly don’t know how she did it all. Even during the regular months, she was already stretched thin, balancing the demands of a full-time, high-pressure academic career with caring for our family. How did she handle all that and organise and host numerous Christmas celebrations? And what toll it must have taken on her mental and physical well-being?
Today, women still shoulder the majority of unpaid domestic, care, cognitive and kin-keeping labour in every single country around the world. We take on most of the cooking, cleaning, and shopping — the more visible tasks — but also the majority of the planning, delegating, coordinating, communicating, worrying, caring and maintaining social ties, all of which frequently go completely unacknowledged. Even heterosexual women who work full-time or who are primary breadwinners spend more time on household chores than their male partners, which sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild famously dubbed the ‘second shift’ over three decades ago. But if you consider all that extra labour required for the holiday ‘magic’ to happen, there’s clearly a seasonal third shift, too — the ‘holiday shift.’
Unsurprisingly, research confirms its existence as well. A 2016 poll of 2,000 adults found that women are, on average, responsible for 17 Christmas-related tasks, such as buying and wrapping gifts, cooking meals, decorating, food shopping, and organising family visits. In contrast, men typically handle just nine jobs, including carving the turkey and assembling children’s toys — activities that are arguably more fun than exhausting. A study by YouGov, though slightly dated, also found that women overwhelmingly handle Christmas jobs: sending Christmas cards is split female to male by 69%-12%, buying gifts by 61%-8%; doing the food shopping by 54%-13%; and cooking the Christmas dinner by 51%-17%.
One 2018 survey even revealed not only that men are less involved than their female partners but that many actively avoid participating, with 62% of men admitting to ‘seeking time away’ from family during Christmas gatherings, while 18% avoid washing up and 15% avoid any tidying up entirely. After all, ‘managing’ the home, especially during festive periods, is still predominantly seen as a ‘woman’s job.’
Of course, breaking free from these traditional expectations — which aren’t exactly that ‘traditional’ anyway, given that family holiday gatherings are a relatively recent custom — is no small feat. It can be challenging to let go of the belief that it’s solely our responsibility — that if we don’t do it, no one else will. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.
In particular, considering the toll this labour and the pressure to fulfil it can take on us.
Social media also doesn’t exactly help relieve women of the pressure to create a picture-perfect presentation of their homes and families during the holidays. If anything, it often makes it so much worse.
I try to avoid the online festive rabbit hole, but occasionally, I do catch glimpses of it: homes bursting with an overwhelming amount of decorations, families dressed in coordinated pyjamas, twinkling lights in every corner, and steaming hot cocoa served in Christmas-themed mugs. It’s like stepping into a Hallmark movie set. It’s also a gross example of overconsumption.
All of this can add to the unrealistic expectations we place on our own celebrations and encourage overspending, yes, but it can also heighten our levels of stress and anxiety — especially for women.
Another recent YouGov study found that while only 35% of men feel stressed around Christmas, 51% of women do. Over a third of women also reported feeling anxious, compared to less than a quarter of men. Similarly, a 2019 poll found that 41% of women felt their worst before Christmas because ‘many are still responsible for all festive duties, from buying and wrapping presents to cooking the Christmas feast — all while having a full-time job and attending a boozy Christmas party or two.’ It also suggested that these holiday pressures negatively impact both women’s mental and physical health.
Findings on the cost of unpaid domestic and care labour disproportionately carried out by women point in a similar direction. In fact, a recent meta-analysis published in The Lancet Public Health, which examined 19 studies covering 70,310 people globally, found that the more unpaid domestic labour women do, the worse their mental health outcomes become.
However, the unequal distribution of holiday-related workloads could also harm our relationships’ health. Research consistently indicates that heterosexual men and women who endorse ‘traditional’ gender roles tend to experience lower relationship satisfaction. Meanwhile, egalitarian couples, where the division of labour is split much more evenly, report higher relationship quality. In one extensive survey of married couples, 81% of egalitarian couples said they were happy, in contrast to just 18% of ‘traditional’ ones. Studies also show that adhering to ‘traditional’ norms doesn’t diminish the probability of getting divorced — actually, some suggest it makes it more likely.
Women may be socially conditioned to believe that ‘keeping a man’ and having a happy family requires an ungodly amount of work around holidays and going above and beyond to satisfy everyone else’s needs — just like many of us saw our mothers and grandmothers do — but that’s not exactly the case, is it?
The only certain outcome is that it leaves women feeling overstretched, stressed, or even burnt out.
But we really shouldn’t kill ourselves for a little bit of holiday magic. And all these tasks that help make it happen shouldn’t fall only on our shoulders.
I’ve never been particularly fond of the winter holiday season as an adult. Being non-religious is the main reason why, but I imagine witnessing my mother nearly collapse from exhaustion and stress during these times in my childhood played its part, too.
What I do enjoy, however, is using this break as an opportunity to slow down and relax properly.
As psychologist Nicola Jane Hobbs puts it:
I do not want to be remembered as a woman who was always exhausted. I do not want to be remembered as a woman who was always stressed, always busy, always rushing, always holding herself together and pushing through. I would like to be remembered as a relaxed woman, a compassionate woman, a curious, joyful, pleasure-loving woman.
In a world consumed by staggering rates of overwork and burnout and stress, carving whatever time we can from our hectic lives to enjoy a bit of peace, joy, and genuine connection is something we could all benefit from — not just women. After all, in many pagan traditions, the period around the winter solstice has always been seen as the perfect moment to do precisely that — to rest, reflect and restore our minds and bodies, mirroring the natural world around us.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to sprinkle a little holiday magic into our lives in addition to that — whether for the joy of our families or simply to treat ourselves. Celebrations can bring comfort and meaning. And kin-keeping activities — like planning and hosting gatherings — are integral to building and maintaining social bonds and shouldn’t be dismissed as insignificant (though they often are, precisely because they remain predominantly seen as ‘women’s work’).
But must this magic always translate to purchasing an avalanche of new shiny products that will likely end up in landfills or gathering dust in forgotten storage spaces? And does it need to be achieved at the expense of women’s invisible and undervalued labour — the countless hours spent decorating, cooking, cleaning, and orchestrating the ‘perfect holiday’?
Women aren’t just ‘naturally’ better at gift-wrapping or house-decorating or party-hosting. We aren’t born as magic-makers — it’s a role society conditions us to embrace from a very young age. Meanwhile, the infantilising cultural narrative that men are somehow less capable of such tasks discourages them from ever trying to participate or learn how to do them. But they absolutely can — and should.
And I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that we’d live in a much better world if maintaining social ties and nurturing relationships — during the holidays and beyond — weren’t seen as solely a woman’s responsibility. And if care, empathy, compassion, and community-building weren’t framed as inherently ‘feminine’ and therefore perceived as less important to the functioning and progress of our world.
If anything, they are now more needed than possibly ever before.
It’s not Santa Claus, elves, or the glittering facade of capitalist consumer culture that makes the holidays feel magical to so many people. It’s the often invisible, unacknowledged, and undervalued labour of women: the holiday shift.
But this extra layer of work, like the unpaid labour women continue to shoulder disproportionately year-round, as well as the gendering of values that should simply be seen as human, comes at a significant cost: to women’s health, well-being, the state of our relationships, and even the fabric of our society.
And that’s neither sustainable, fair, nor truly ‘magical,’ is it?
I fucking hate the holidays because of this and performative bullshit family theater. If I could be put into a coma from the last week in November through the first week of January every year I would.
If, perhaps, it did not fall to individual women to act alone for every aspect of making the holiday work (as so the stereotyped but accurate image goes), but active collaboration among family members to sub-divide the labor, women would not feel the need to accomplish it all to make it work. In my family, at least, events and activities are subcontracted among a large group of people, but I know not everyone has that luxury.
It is possible to make sure women do not have to believe it all has to "come out of {their] holly jolly butt" (as one fictional animated woman once put it), and being considerate and thoughtful about not making everything the responsibility of one person will go a long way towards redefining this outdated attitude towards December labor.