How the holidays became peak gendered labor. (And why I love them anyway.)

Ah, December my old friend.

Dec 01, 2024

‘Tis the season! We are running a limited-time, end-of-year discount on annual subscriptions for just $39. (That’s only $3.25 a month!)

Paid subscribers get access to bi-weekly paid posts, subscriber chats, book club membership and the full MR archive. Independent feminist journalism is a great gift for yourself or someone else.

Want to help your friends and family sane through the upcoming year? May we suggest an MR gift subscription!

Upgrade to Paid for just $39/year

Give a gift subscription

It’s December. And before I get pulled headlong into the end of the year, I’m pausing here to take stock of what that will entail: the physical and logistical toll, and the mental and emotional one, too.

Every year I have amnesia, and think it will be different. But every year it’s not different.

So, here’s a reminder to myself of how the end of the year is going to go, based on past experience.

Every December, I go into the month with a naïve nervous excitement. This is a delusional nervous excitement, in which I think somehow this will be the year that is different. That I’m different.

This time, the end of the year and the winter holidays will be like the trip to Disneyland where no one gets motion sickness, and the lines aren’t long, and no one gets hot and tired and yells at each other and no one vomits, and we all magically go on Space Mountain 5 times in a row laughing our heads off.

I hold onto this delusion, even though every December for the last many, many Decembers, is metaphorically and in some ways literally the trip to Disneyland where someone throws up, and someone cries, and family fun warps into family dysfunction at breakneck, Space Mountain-like speed.

Lest I forget, here are a list of some of the lows and not-great behaviors I racked up last December, as I chronicled at the time:

-One December morning before my daughter’s winter school assembly, when pre-holiday stress and feelings were at a fever pitch, I arrived late to a cafe for a meet-up with a group of parents that I barely know. Upon arrival, I immediately got overwhelmed with social anxiety when I saw that the tables were full and there wasn’t a place for me to sit with the group. So I turned around and walked out before anyone could see me, like I was a 7^th-grader feeling awkward in the lunchroom.

-I experienced piercing annoyance (that maybe definitely registered on my face) when I was pressured to perform a group karaoke number at a holiday party.

-I purchased cookie boxes as gifts for neighbors and friends, and got zero of them delivered before we got on a 5 am flight to head out west to visit family for the holidays.

-I dismissed attempts my partner made to make plans for my (December) birthday, then made plans for his birthday that takes place later the same week, then had a highly predictable and avoidable meltdown on my own birthday when there were not plans to my satisfaction. This may have involved an episode where I threw away what I perceived to be a thoughtless gift in the garbage immediately after I opened the package. Just plop—right in the trash. (This was so immature and yet also I have to admit felt right in the moment, what can I say??).

This brings me to my first note to self, which is that the end of the year is A GLASS CASE OF EMOTION.

It just is. True, I have my birthday and my partner’s birthday in December to really top it off. I also usually have approximately 45 papers and projects to grade, since I’m a uni prof, and about 8 hours of childcare to do it before my daughter’s school closes for the holidays.

But don’t we all have our own version of this, where everything just piles upppp in December, especially for parents, and especially for women and moms, to where it’s just not not going to be a meltdown at some point?

There’s no denying that the holidays are a time of peak mental (and physical) load for women.

Women are the holidays.

We all know that if left to men, our holiday memories would boil down to a pack of stale lifesavers wrapped in newspaper, and delivery from Jersey Mike’s.

I sometimes think the best way for women to bring the world to a screaming halt wouldn’t be Lysistrata or the 4B movement, but just women collectively refusing to do any holiday cooking, gifting, decorating, cleaning or winter holiday merry-making of any kind.

The economy, and all of society, would collapse on itself before winter solstice.

How did we get here?

Was there ever a time when the waning days of December were not marked by women panic-buying last-minute gifts based on their Amazon Prime delivery date, while planning a 5-course meal, while burning a batch of cookies for the school cookie exchange? 1

For the answer to this, I have been revisiting the writing of Stephanie Coontz, historian of the American Family, and author of the landmark book, “The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap” in which she debunks the myth of a “traditional” American family. Her research finds that the male breadwinner marriage is the least traditional family in history that was really a historical blip. She argues that nostalgia for an American “tradition” that never really existed is dangerous and unhelpful as a model for living in our current culture.

Families face serious problems today, she writes, but proposals to solve them by reviving "traditional" family forms and values miss two points. First, no single traditional family existed to which we could return, and none of the many varieties of families in our past has had any magic formula for protecting its members from the vicissitudes of socioeconomic change, the inequities of class, race, and gender, or the consequences of interpersonal conflict. Violence, child abuse, poverty, and the unequal distribution of resources to women and children have occurred in every period and every type of family, including the 1950’s.

Pertinent to the holidays in particular is this interesting historical tidbit from her research: The tradition of family gatherings during the holidays is relatively recent. In the seventeenth and early eighteenth century, Christmas was more a time for celebrating with neighbors than a family occasion.

And actually, the roles of men in society required interpersonal connections, which meant that men organized social gatherings.

Yes, men organized social gatherings. It’s hard to imagine what that would look like, since women now do the vast majority of the mental load and invisible labor in heterosexual couples, including social calendaring and execution of social plans of all sorts—from family gatherings to birthday parties to date nights.

This new normal, Coontz writes, is an advent of the nineteenth century, which saw “a much more bureaucratic world, politically and economically,” she writes, “where personal ties are separate from political and economic ties––men take care of political and economic ties, the breadwinning. And women come to take over the interpersonal relations––the kin-keeping, social-networking with neighbors and friends.”

Coontz, whose book became a touchstone in the 90’s when “family values” moral panic was at a fever pitch, has argued that our own era is but one of many historic periods of upheaval. Her work seems even more poignant in our current moment when segments of society mourn the MAGA “decline of the male breadwinner” era of the 1950’s and rely on calls for a return to regressive gender roles. Yet, Coontz writes, early 19th-century Americans were in turn mourning the decline of the era before them, the decline of the pre-industrialized farm economy era.

There are significant parallels between then and now.

By 1830, as the factory age. took hold, alcoholism rose to historic highs. Anxious citizens sought comfort in religious revivals and scapegoated Roman Catholics, Masons, bankers and foreigners. There were 16 urban riots in 1834, and 37 in 1835.

These shifts also created massive anxiety about shifts in family life. As society changed, so did the shape of the family, Coontz writes.

Leisurely family dinners and large holiday gatherings developed post-farm economy amid concerns that men’s work—which now took them away from home and homestead—made them strangers to the family. To soothe anxieties that men’s domestic authority was being undercut by their absence in the home, big Sunday dinners and family holiday gatherings of increasing size sprung up.

So yes, gendered holiday labor of epic proportions is a fairly new advent, and yes, to some degree, like so much of unpaid labor performed by women, it was initiated to center men and soothe their anxieties under the pressures of patriarchal capitalism.

But also, it sprung from the ongoing human need to connect. The biggest lesson to takeaway from Coontz’s intensive historic study of American family life is that there was never a “right” time in history when family life was at its peak, it has always been shaped by economic and political forces. And increasingly those economic and political forces demand time away from each other and pull us away from each other, and away from home, creating demands that pull us into lonely spheres in ways that none of us really wish for.

And I still think that holidays are an antidote for that, too.

My partner, who is not American and did not grow up with a lot of money, sees my American-style December scramble and Space Mountain-level emotional rollercoaster as mostly unnecessary and self-inflicted. And I think he’s half-right.

But I think he’s only half right.

Because I need, we need, things to look forward to.

We need times that are special. And those things just don’t happen often without some planning and setting-aside and celebration-making.

My partner and I aren’t religious and don’t practice the different Christian faiths that we were raised in, but the winter holidays and the end of the year are nonetheless a time of anticipation, for me, at least.

“It’s just another day,” my partner says about the Christmas build-up.

I disagree.

So many of my days, especially September through December, which is my busiest season at work, are a grind of too much work and not enough hours in the day. Many weeks it feels like we are just trying to get through the day, each day, and waking up and doing it again.

I long to have days that are special, where time is bent and stretches out and feels different and luxurious. We all need this, I need this.

So, I want to remind myself of the other side—the highs of the December Glass Case of Emotion. Because these things and these feelings also happened this December:

-I welled up in happy tears as my daughter’s kindergarten class sang “This little light of mine” at her school’s winter assembly program, and she searched for my face in the audience and found it, and gave me a little thumbs up.

-As I prepared to write a holiday card that I would ultimately run out of time to deliver, I felt a rush of gratitude for a family that befriended us this year at my daughter’s new school where we didn’t know anyone, and who made us feel like we belong when they really didn’t have to.

-I felt a wash of joy belting: “Yeah, I wanna dance with somebody/ I wanna feel the ^heat with somebody” into a microphone during a Whitney Houston karaoke number (that I initially resisted) at a holiday party with a half-dozen women and children that I barely know.

So yes, the Glass Case of Emotion at the end of the year entails exhaustion and sometimes tears. Is it the holiday spirit, is it the ravages of peak capitalist consumerism in an age of never-ending crises, or in my case, the hormonal swings of pre-menopause? It’s probably all of the above.

But that’s not all of it.

The end of the year offers connection and community and gathering with humans. And while my partner is right that I don’t need to overdo it with a million traditions and gifts, I do need a few.

I’m not advocating for forcing oneself to do things that you don’t want to, or doing way too much, or to connect with family or groups that are toxic and bring you down. I am advocating for leaning into the parts that do feel good.

I need something to look forward to that feels like a comforting rhythm, a pattern of good things to come.

And I especially need it at the end of the year, which feels like the end of a long sprint, and when we take stock of the year whether we want to or not. When I felt the Glass Case of Emotion coming on this year, my body reminded me that December has been really, really hard in the last several years.

We all just keep living through one crisis after another, and it’s a lot for our hearts to handle, you know? There was the pandemic, and then Ukraine, and now the tragedy in Israel followed by the unspeakable tragedy unfolding in Gaza. And this December we are processing the results of the election and what’s to come. This is how we live now, and that is bound to come to the surface at the end of the year as we take stock, too.

But the thing that I want to remember is that the traditions and gatherings and singing assemblies and karaoke parties, and organized special-ness give us space to connect to each other, and to joy. And we need that.

It can feel strange to plan for and make space for joy when there is so much suffering and injustice, but as writer and activist adrienne maree brown has written, “Feeling good is not frivolous, it is freedom.”

Joy and celebration are human, and denying those things dehumanizes us. Activist Darya Alikhani notes that “maintaining, repurposing and creating forms of celebration is an affirmation of life and a marker of our humanity,” and that what historian D. Wiggins called “moments of unguarded merrymaking” have always been forms of resistance.

So the end of the year is going to be a Glass Case of Emotion, but it might be throwing snowballs at your sister, too. And clapping and stomping and singing that Caribbean classic “Bring out de Ham” that your partner taught your family to chant at Christmas dinner.

And that organized merrymaking and connection is not nothing. That is the Space Mountain energy that we need to carry us into, and through, another year.

Matriarchy Report

Discussion about this post