What Christmas Takes

It’s mid-December. The kitchen smells like cinnamon and burnt sugar. The tree is up, every light working, decorated with the kind of care that takes hours. The gifts are mostly wrapped. I haven’t started shopping. She’s been at this since October.

This is the rhythm of it. The women organize, execute, carry. Most of the Christmas labor is theirs—the shopping, decorating, cooking, the cleanup after the meal. It’s such a normal arrangement that nobody thinks of it as an arrangement. This is just how Christmas happens.

The numbers, if you care about them: women do 66 percent of the planning, 75 percent of the gift-buying, 78 percent of the decorating. But those percentages miss the real work—the mental load, the lists made at two in the morning, the coordination of everyone else’s unspoken expectations. It’s all the invisible stuff that stops being invisible only when it stops happening.

And it’s exhausting. Of course it’s exhausting. You’re managing a holiday for people who didn’t ask you to manage anything, on a timeline that was never negotiated, with expectations nobody voiced out loud. Christmas magic requires someone to sacrifice her peace for it. We act like the tree decorates itself, the food appears by magic, the whole thing just happens. It doesn’t.

I don’t know what changes this. Ask people to split the load more fairly? That sounds like asking for credit for baseline participation. Do the work without being asked, without needing recognition? That should already be the expectation. Want less—fewer gifts, simpler meals, bare walls? That’s not Christmas. The holiday comes with an understood aesthetic and effort requirement, and someone bears that effort. Usually a woman.

So December circles around again. The list stays long. The coffee goes cold. The work continues, invisible until it’s done. Christmas morning arrives with everyone marveling at the magic that didn’t make itself.