My Christmas Invisible Labor is For Myself

A tale as old as time: she's doing everything for Christmas; nobody asked for it.

Photo by Juliana Malta on Unsplash

When I was a kid, my mom was really into Christmas. She played Christmas choir music from Thanksgiving onward, collected obscene amounts of now-rare Gladys Boalt handmade ornaments, and our house was decorated with approximately two hundred and seventy eight authentic German nutcrackers. We were spoiled on Christmas morning, and sometimes she would get us so many gifts (all wrapped in coordinating paper, ribbons and bows that matched our favorite colors in an aesthetic color palette) that she would realize she went overboard and then hoard the extra gifts in the basement to be given out for future Christmases (this led to me being gifted Josefina the American Girl Doll’s piano when I was thirteen.)

She didn’t go overboard for other holidays, or spoil us year-round. It was specifically a Christmas thing because my mom loved Christmas. My dad certainly played along, but given that he was Jewish and didn’t grow up with Christmas, there was approximately a zero percent chance that my dad was demanding my mom do any of this. And for that matter, my brother and I weren’t demanding, or even requesting it either.

Aside from the presents, there was a lot that my brother and I could have gladly done without. For example, for Christmas dinner she would always make a multi-course meal for our family (plus our cousins and family friends) which included venison and/or pheasant, pomegranate gravy, mashed potatoes, greens, chestnut stuffing, multiple different kinds of Christmas cookies, some layer cake that took her basically two years to make, and bespoke marzipan fruits. Our Christmas was, frankly, nearly Trumpian in its excesses, missing only the Big Macs and the Fox and Friends.

Although everyone loved my mom’s elaborate Christmases, we all knew it was more effort than any of us expected of her. On some level, my mom did this because she really enjoyed it. There was no demanding husband or mother-in-law, no judgy neighbor ladies, nobody forcing her to do all of this. Sure, if she had decided to serve Chef Boyardee one Christmas, we would have been disappointed and maybe got her evaluated for a mental health crisis, but if she had forgone the venison and just did a simple roast chicken with mashed potatoes, or put out only fifty-four nutcrackers, I’m confident nobody would have cared.

And yet, every year she toiled away, staying up past midnight and working herself half to death. Obliviously, my brother and I would just allow this to happen, not realizing that at some point during the afternoon on Christmas day, she would reach a breaking point where she would yell at us for not helping enough, and threaten to cancel all future Christmases. It had become a family meme at a certain point—that when the clock struck four, Mom would threaten to “cancel Christmas.” Every single time, we had the same thought: But we never asked you to do this! You didn’t have to do this! We just want to play video games!

As we got older, we helped a little. Obviously, we were a little spoiled, and little kids don’t fully understand that. As a pre-teen and teenager, I enjoyed helping Mom wrap my brother’s presents, and my brother began gathering firewood. By the time we were teenagers, we helped decorate the house. But, as many-a-husband involved in “invisible labor” discussions can attest, we frequently “did it wrong.” We put nutcrackers in the wrong place, we used garland inappropriately, and by far the most common grievance was that we unevenly clustered the ornaments on the tree, with bias for our own line of sight. Some might say we “weaponized incompetence,” although I think we actually did our best. I remember one year, after a particularly tense house-decorating ritual, my mom sighed and congratulated herself for lowering her standards and not going “all out.” My brother and I, who had just arranged multiple different frosted fruit centerpieces and filled mock stuffings with antique puppets, looked at each other like, what the fuck?

Fast forward twenty years. Now I’m the mom taking on most of the holiday labor. I don’t do the crazy-extravagant Christmases that my mom did (in part because my husband would never let me spend that kind of money) but I do a whole lot more than my husband or kids expect. My in-laws don’t put any pressure on me, and neither does my husband. He doesn’t care what our wrapping paper looks like. He likes to have a Christmas tree (which he puts up himself) but doesn’t care much for other decor. He likes good food on Christmas, but doesn’t see the need for four courses with multiple soups, and doesn’t see the point in making multiple types of cookies. And that buche de noel with marzipan sugar plums and raspberry cream filling I made last year? I’m not sure he even ate it!

Nobody talks about the invisible labor of a yule log cake.

All of this has gotten me to the point where I realized I am basically just “my mom lite.” I do…probably 98% of the holiday stuff, and nobody is forcing me to do it, nor will anything fall apart if I don’t do it. I have a feeling I’m not alone in this—that many moms out there are working themselves too hard, not because anyone is forcing them to do it but because they ultimately care about Christmas more than anyone else does. And given that not only is the labor unequal, but the desire is unequal, how should families approach this? How can we deal with all the invisible labor of the holidays that’s really just for ourselves?