I’ve had some Christmas stats through from one of my favourite brands, Stripe & Stare, makers of the world’s most comfy knickers™. They commissioned a survey to find out who, in families, does most of the Christmas prep - who wraps the presents, who carries the mental load, and so on.
Honestly if you can’t guess who carries more of the mental load at Christmas, then you and I can no longer be friends: had the results come back saying anything other than the below I’d have eaten my own hat. And it’s a faux fur hat that makes me look like a 70s Russian spy from a Bond movie so it wouldn’t be the easiest meal.
The results, of course, confirm that behind every successful Christmas there’s usually a woman, a woman who is simultaneously Googling “which supermarket does the best turkey”, ordering more baubles for the cat to shatter and trying to find out what Great Aunt Edna’s postal address is for the Christmas card.
A whopping 54% of women in the survey said that Christmas wouldn’t happen normally (ie satisfactorily, if you want me to read between the lines on that one) if they didn’t organise it, compared to just 20% of men.
My own family Christmas would run just fine if I didn’t organise it. So long as we would be happy to have no Christmassy plans, no Christmassy visitors, no Christmas cards sent and no presents to give out other than those for the kids.
HA.
Actually, when I write that down, it makes me realise that Rich probably does more than me in terms of the stuff that makes it feel Christmassy - the tree, the decorating, buying mince pies (which I hate), putting on Christmas movies - whereas my tasks are admin-heavy and virtually invisible to anyone other than me.
Rich also loves wrapping presents - 73% of women wrapped the presents in the survey, compared to only 29% of men, so I’m a bit of an outlier on that front, but I totally relate to the mental load statistic, which said that 43% of women carry the mental load compared to only 13% of men.
Rich tends to have quite a laissez faire attitude to Christmas (in fact most things) and so long as it has roast potatoes, Raiders of the Lost Ark on the telly and a tin of Quality Street he couldn’t really give a hoot what else went on. That would be his perfect Christmas, I reckon - a pot of HP sauce to dip the roast potatoes into balanced on the arm of the armchair.
It does make me question whether I make a rod for my own back with it all, when it comes to festive prep; I also wonder whether a lot of my work-related Christmas stuff (Black Friday collaborations, gift guides, getting posts done before the end of the year) bleeds over into my personal list so that Christmas just becomes this mammoth old admin monstrosity rather than the delightful time of making family memories that it should be.
Perhaps it all needs simplifying.
My favourite stat, though, because it comes with something akin to an actual tagline, is that 55% of women say they make Christmas happen, compared to only 24% of men.
I MAKE CHRISTMAS HAPPEN!™
But all this has got me a-thinking: what are the things we do in our household to “make Christmas happen?” What traditions have we developed as a family? When I was little my favourite traditions were a) putting the tree up (fir needles absolutely everywhere for months) and then b) Midnight Mass, which we were allowed to stay up for and which always finished with Hark the Heralds which was so rousing and exciting that I used to get tears of excitement in my eyes.
But what do we do now? Let us examine the family traditions:
Erecting the Giganto-Tree
Unpacking and setting up the enormous 10ft Christmas tree takes an entire day, pretty much. Three huge storage bags, which are heavier than body bags (I imagine, I haven’t yet disposed of a body) have to be dragged out of the shed and into the house and its construction requires the use of a ladder. It’s massive. I always wanted the sort of showstopping tree that you’d see in an American movie - something with presence, that filled the room in an almost ridiculous way, so I bought this 10ft White Vermont Spruce one from Balsam Hill. It is very realistic, even to the point where you need to wear special gloves to arrange all of the branches because they’re so spiky. It was very expensive, but five years down the line it has almost paid for itself (if half is almost) (ssh) with what I would have paid for the equivalent huge real trees and, of course, it should last for decades and decades.
I’d say “it should see me out” but I can’t imagine Rich risking life and limb to get up a ladder at the age of 90 to install the top third of a Balsam Hill tree.
Actually, I can.
You’d think I’d quite like the decorating part of the tree process but I really don’t! I hate the feel of the needles as you guide the threaded loops of the baubles down the branches, it makes me feel queasy. I only join in because the kids would be downcast if I didn’t. Personally I think that Rich should have to do the entire tree, even though I was the one who bought it against his strict advice, because I feel as though I do the majority of the other stuff, including:
Making the Christmas Card
Every year since 2015 we have sent a family Christmas card. Rich is a portrait photographer, so he takes the picture (always of the kids/pets/just pets) and then I get it printed up at the printers and spend approximately one entire twenty four hour period writing increasingly unhinged messages inside them (why do you lose all sense of how to string a normal sentence together after card number twenty?) before spending about eighty thousand pounds on stamps, stealth-researching the names of people’s kids, finding everyone’s addresses and then sliding the finished cards into the postbox in batches as big as I can fit through the slot.
Last year I went on strike, because Rich always says how the Christmas card doesn’t even matter and adds more stress to proceedings, and I thought, I’ll show YOU!
The thing was, it really didn’t matter to him and so he simply didn’t do one. Shot myself in the foot there! I humphed about it for the entire Christmas period. Over the past decade, the cards have told a little story - babies growing into kids, pets growing grey - and personally I thought it was a big shame to have introduced a blip into the proceedings.
The question is: can we go back to it now? The ordered, finickity part of my brain says no, we cannot, we have broken the cycle and we must just find another type of card to send. The sentimental part of my brain is urging me to think of a really good “comeback card”…
Ordering the Special Christmas Food Items
Ordering my treaty food bits from “the posh brochure” has become a bit of a tradition for me over the past five years. The Dukeshill catalogue comes in the post in late October, and I sit there circling the things I want with my biro, a bit like my Mum used to do with the Freemans catalogue circa 1985, or the Gites de France brochure.
(Do you remember when you had to book holidays from brochures that you got from the travel agents and each hotel or campsite or whatever had to fit its entire sales pitch into a box that was about an inch wide? They were lucky if they got two photos in! “Swimming pool. Restaurant. Free sun-loungers.”)
I don’t really order special foodie bits at other times in the year, it’s strictly a Christmas thing and I get the same items, more or less, every time:
1 a giant pork pie (feeds a big family with multiple slices, there’s something both obscene and beautiful about it, I plonk it on a large wooden chopping board and surround it with chutneys and cheese and cherry tomatoes and so on and then everyone can leave me alone and not keep asking when dinner will be ready)
2 a box of Rose & Violet creams (these are for me and me only. I refuse to share them. Have you seen the price per chocolate? Quality Streets these are not!)
3 a Classic Cheese Selection (has a top tier trio of cheeses, this: Colston Bassett Stilton, which is softer and less stilton-y than normal stilton, if you ask me, Montgomery’s Cheddar and a great big wallop of gooey Baron Bigod.)
There’s always invariably a ham of some kind (they are famous for their hams!) and a couple of times we’ve had a turkey, but Rich is a big believer that all turkey tastes the same (dry, rank) and is a fan of the Sainsbury’s Bronze so it depends how plucky (lol) I’m feeling when I do the order.
I enjoy this little ritual. I always thought I’d be much more into doing lots of Christmas entertaining than I’ve ended up doing in adult life. My Mum bought me Nigella’s Christmas years and years ago and each November I sit and re-read it and think about the nibbles I’d serve if I threw a drinks party, and then the whole thing makes me tired and I have to have a little sleep.
We usually have the entire family for either Christmas or Boxing Day, which is joyful, but I think while the kids are young (ish) there’s never going to be a sophisticated soirée with special cocktails and a constant carousel of amazing canapés happening - I just don’t have the bandwidth for it!
Hiding the Elves
Bloody hell I don’t know how I got roped into this one. I think a client might have sent me some elves for whatever reason, and I thought I’d arrange them doing something stupid for a laugh, and here we are seven years later, getting back out of bed at 1am in a panic because the elves are still hanging from the pendant lamp in the kitchen, which is where they were yesterday and if they haven’t moved overnight then ALL OF THE MAGIC HAS GONE.
I do the elf moving, Rich fills up the little wooden calendar with some sweets. They’re not allowed to open the calendar door until they’ve found the elves and so each morning in December starts with the kids rampaging around the house.
(Though I think that the game is up, when it comes to my eleven year-old. She rolled her eyes at the mention of elves the other day and said she couldn’t be bothered to wake up early to hunt for them. Even for sweets? I said. I’ll just buy my own, she replied. Dagger to the heart.)
Buying the Presents
I always feel rather tight when I talk about Christmas presents for my immediate family, because we really try to rein it in and only get stuff we know the kids will use. Things that will delight them. In recent years, it has been the stocking from Santa that has transfixed them, filled as they have been with weird things like fake poos from the joke shop (incredibly realistic), big fluffy slipper socks and exotic-looking sweets from those overpriced high street candy emporiums that are almost definitely money laundering / criminal activity fronts.
I don’t buy anything for Rich, because he doesn’t ever need anything, and he doesn’t get anything for me, because I want loads of things but he always takes it upon himself to go off piste and then whatever he gets ends up going back.
SEE?
Actually it’s not about being tight so much as I cannot stand waste and wastefulness. What’s the point of getting him, I don’t know, an iPhone, when he already has a slightly older iPhone? What would be the joy in it? What would there be to delight him? It’s just spending a load of money for the sake of it, isn’t it?
So we do this thing where we find something we both love or want, eg a painting, or something else for the house, or a weekend away, and that’s what we get for Christmas.
I also do buy myself small (ish) treats throughout the festive period, usually because I’ve bought something for someone else and then feel as though it’s too nice to give away. 33% of women in the Stripe & Stare survey have done this, by the way - bought themselves a present from somebody else and wrapped it. I don’t go as far as wrapping it, and also nobody else pays for it, so it’s not quite the same, but it makes me feel financially more savvy if I use those particular optics!
My most-coveted little treats-to-self tend to be bed socks (these cashmere or these alpaca), books (I mean, the world is my oyster) and fancy chocs. Though I’ve just seen that Stripe & Stare’s “days of the week” knicker packs are back after a bit of a hiatus, and so they will be heading up the top of my mental gift-to-self list!
Wrapping the Presents
I don’t see why we can’t wrap all of the presents the week before Christmas: Rich likes to do them all on Christmas Eve. It’s sadistic, in my opinion. You’ve got to wait until everyone is safely asleep, which could be 11pm by the time everyone has calmed down enough to close their eyes, and who wants to be wrapping presents at 11pm?
Rich, that’s who. The noisiest sellotape-user in the United Kingdom. So noisy is he, with his tape and his paper-cutting and his throwing around of various things, that I spend half the time wrapping my own pile and the other half glancing at the door in case he’s woken one the kids up.
You’d think there would be a limit to the noise someone could make using paper and tape, but no. I estimate 80 decibels. This year I’m going to wrap my present pile when I want to wrap it (week before) and leave him to it on Christmas Eve, but we all know there’ll be questions on the night and I won’t truly have done my bit. For eg, would his present pile be correctly labelled? Would he assign the appropriate presents to the stocking, so that both children have the same sort of things when they inevitably rip open the stocking gifts at circa 3am?
I have my doubts.
Singing in the Choir
This is now my favourite Christmas tradition. We have a village choir (we’re a tiny village so it’s not a lot of us) and we rehearse every week from the start of November until our Christmas Carol Service. I absolutely love it. I love going to the rehearsals, and being part of a little club (something we tend to miss out on in adulthood, isn’t it?) and I actually find the singing part very mentally stimulating. I did music when I was young (Grade 8 Clarinet and Piano, ta very much!) but reading music when you’re singing the notes not playing them feels loads harder. With piano you know that if you hit the right key it’s going to make the right sound, with singing you see the notes on the score and you have to find your own way, baby. I like it. Taxing!
On Christmas Eve we do another little concert outside of the pub, but on the way there we go around the village singing for the people who aren’t able to get out and about easily. They request carols and we oblige. It’s incredibly rewarding and it’s also the kids’ favourite Christmas event. There’s something about the packed pub with its fire crackling and then all of us villagers standing outside roaring our God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman and so on.
If I had to pick one Christmas “thing”, it would be that. (Interesting to note that it’s entirely free.)
I’m trying to think whether we have any other traditions. We used to go to Panto every year, in Bristol, but after the fourth year I was completely sick of it. There’s only so much “he’s behind you!” (chanted by a thousand kids in unison) that a person can take. I wore ear plugs the last time! So we need to think of something else to go to. It can’t be “sitting on Santa’s knee at a grotto”: they’re too savvy for that now and have started to seriously question how there can be so many different Santas with different faces, glasses and varying colours of beard. And not ice skating, we all almost ended up in A&E last time. Those mad plastic boots they equip you with these days! It’s like they’re made from Duplo! What has happened to the world? How can you possibly ice skate in rigid plastic boots that render your legs unbendable? I looked like a peg dolly.
Tell me: who does all of your Christmas organising? Is it you? Do you have specific jobs that you love to do, or hate to do? Is anyone here a master delegator? Do we have any early birds who have finished their prep by the end of October? And who likes to skate on thin ice and get everything on Christmas Eve? I am all ears…
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