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Having a Good Holiday Season? Thank a Woman!
Holiday cheer is almost exclusively manufactured by women, often at a cost to our own happiness
I love this time of year — the lights, the holiday cheer, family dinners, and kids getting way hyped up for presents and vacation. I also dread it a little bit; between the meals I cook, the holiday cards I write, and the presents and I order and wrap for my immediate and extended family, I feel almost hungover come the new year.
I’m not the only one — holiday cheer is almost exclusively manufactured by women, often at a cost to our own happiness. We cook the meals, we make sure the gifts are ordered for the in-laws, we create the family traditions. It can be really wonderful — I love cooking a huge seven-course fish meal every year, and making my loved ones happy. Watching my kid tear through wrapping paper? There’s nothing like it.
But the lead up to all of that is exhausting, and the expectation that we keep it up every year is completely overwhelming. After all, if someone is missing a gift or a holiday card goes unsent, it won’t be my husband who is judged.
Those expectations and judgment are not so different from the rest of the year, of course: Women still do the vast majority of domestic…
