Mothers Make the Magic

No, I won’t be starting my Christmas prep in September (or October either)

September in the motherhood space online isn’t about back-to-school. No, that’s been and gone. Homemade Hallowe’en costumes and visits to muddy pumpkin patches are already creeping in, despite it being at the end of next month.

But I’ve also seen a few invitations for mothers to start preparing for Christmas. And to that, I say a resounding f*ck off.

There is no other annual event that we are expected to spend almost one-third of the year preparing for. 

It’s both well-documented and obvious that the festive shopping season’s slow march towards August is largely a symptom of our obsession with over-consumption. We even have a name for it: Christmas creep is the term for the buying season starting a little earlier each year.

Christmas creep has been further fuelled in recent years by the influencer economy. The particular combination of needing to promote more stuff for followers to buy whilst also needing to be the first to feed the algorithm with ‘new’ content, has led to a strange twilight zone where Instagram feeds and supermarket aisles are in Christmas mode, while the rest of us are still figuring out the new school timetable and thinking idly about deflating the paddling pool.

Much of Christmas creep is at women and mothers. With studies continuing to show that women take on the bulk of the household grocery shopping in heteropartnered households, how could it not?

Fathers don’t seem to feel the same underlying pressure as mothers to make the festive season magical for their children. A study on gendered language in advertising found that in almost all of the Christmas ads analysed, mothers were depicted as being in charge of making everything happen for Christmas, while fathers were not shown stressing about it or taking much part in preparing for it at all. 

Okay, TV ads aren’t real life. But they can be a good indicator of prevailing cultural attitudes. Women are also more likely to report feeling stressed or anxious about the festive season than men (for real life), and this gendered pressure to prepare and perform the ‘perfect’ Christmas season is a window into the inequity still present in a lot of millennial households. 

While millennial fathers take on more childrearing and homemaking than men of previous generations, there is still a huge and observable gap between the praise heaped on fathers for meeting the basic everyday needs of their children and the distain for women who are seen to give anything perceived as less than The Best.

I call this the ‘feminist-on-paper’ effect. While the (millennial) husbands and partners of my (millennial) friends would say that they are feminists, would support action that works to close the gender pay gap, and may even have considered taking their wives’ last names when they got married, when it comes to equity in their own homes they still tend to fall short — particularly if and when they become parents. 

A highly unscientific poll of my Instagram followers this week showed a heavy lean towards women, wives, and mothers taking on much of the additional labour and cognitive burden associated with the festive season. The more interesting conversation though, was happening in the DMs: Do women just care more about making festive magic than their partners do?

Like so many things when it comes to motherhood: its nuanced.

A lot of women (I am a lot of women) enjoy at least some of the festive magic-making. Many of us are nostalgic for our own childhoods, and particularly for those of us with young children, witnessing the magic you’ve created reflected back on their faces is truly a wonderful feeling.

And.

Much of the additional labour is exhausting. I’ve written before about how women face a much higher social penalty for failing to keep their home tidy or to stay on top of the laundry — and I’d argue that we see the same effect when it comes to all the festive magic-making extras. Maybe we want to create festive magic because we enjoy it, and maybe we want to create festive magic because we feel pressured to perform a certain kind of motherhood, and maybe we don’t need to separate those things.

The dichotomy of wanting to create magic but also wanting a fucking break is very real. 

And there is a wider issue at play here, of course. All that extra doing and thinking and caring adds up to the mental load that means women with young children are more likely than their male counterparts to take a career hit or develop burnout symptoms — or both — in pursuit of ‘good’ parenting.

This is particularly evident at Christmas time when the extra kin-keeping, magic-making, gift-giving, calendar-organizing, house-cleaning, food-prepping and guest-hosting of the season largely falls on the shoulders of mothers.

While young children may be the intended audience for this season-long Christmas show, grown men often get to sit back and be spectators, too. That extra work of magic-making — and keeping that extra work hidden behind the scenes —  keeps mothers from spending time with their children.

With no Christmas ‘tradition’ is this more true than the elf on the shelf. Somewhere between my childhood in the ‘90s and my daughter’s in the ‘20s, this goddamn elf appeared. As well as being a symbol of constant surveillance, and an overall ineffective way to encourage positive behaviours in children, the elf is a very literal way that parents (and usually mothers) are expected to create festive magic as a performance for their children, and not alongside them.

I posted last year, in a moment of elf-on-the-shelf fuelled frustration about some of my enduring memories of Christmastime from my own childhood:

✨️ Waving my parents off to the annual Christmas party, in a waft of perfume and aftershave, while my sisters and I spent the night decorating the Christmas cake with our Grandmother.

✨️ Sorting through last years Christmas cards as a family, rotating two pairs of scissors between five of us as we cut out pictures to decorate our gifts.

✨️ Walking the empty aisles of the supermarket at 6am on Christmas eve, getting some one-one-one time with my mum while she filled the trolley with too much food.

All of those things are part of the Christmas magic-making: the cake decorating, the gift-wrapping, the grocery shopping. The difference is that I was involved in all these moments. Don’t get me wrong, my parents created plenty of behicd-the-scenes festive magic too. But children want connection, not stuff. Well, maybe they want some stuff.

The pressure to perform holiday-related domesticity (and the resulting mental and emotional load of festive magic-making) still overwhelmingly falls to women and mothers. I’m not suggesting we stop making the magic, I’m suggesting we examine where the magic is really made. 

It’s okay to reject the traditions that aren’t working for you (*ahem* elf *ahem*) and it’s okay to delegate some of the magic-making to your child’s other parent. It’s okay to keep doing the behind-the-scenes magic that brings you and your children joy — but don’t forget to take a front-row seat to witness that joy, too. And it’s also okay to invite your children into the magic-making, not just the magic.

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Tell me about the festive magic-making you remember taking part in as a child and the Christmas work you’re leaving behind this year. Or, tell me how your September has been because Christmas creep is real and we’re still nearly three months out!

Thanks for reading! I’m a multi-passionate mother writer. You can find essays, stories and poetry about the joy and the juggle of early motherhood here on Cold Coffee, along with my podcast Mother, Creator and journalling prompts for £4/mo in the Mothership. I’m also a trained journalist and I support small business owners with their writing at TheCopyshop.studio.