The emotional labour women perform at Christmas: ‘My husband must think Santa does it all’

If you’re a woman in a heterosexual relationship, chances are that you’re the one doing a disproportionate amount of the work this Christmas: shopping for presents, wrapping them, making up spare beds and decorating the tree, organising the cooking, clearing up the wrapping paper and discarded ribbons, cleaning the plates and storing the leftovers, and a thousand other physical chores in between.

Britain’s Office for National Statistics has found that women do 40 per cent more housework and childcare than men. A recent nationwide poll even suggested that British men will spend 11 hours over the Christmas period hiding away from their families. One colleague remarked that she has no idea where her husband thinks all the presents magically appear from. “Maybe he still believes in Santa!”

Over the past few years, however, there has been a growing awareness, not just of the unpaid domestic chores that women take on, but also of the more subtle, unnoticed and unrewarded tasks: the burden of what has become widely known as “emotional labour”. At no time is this burden heavier than at Christmas.

Lucy’s mother died when she was young and, ever since, she has felt huge pressure to step into her mum’s shoes, buying all the presents for the extended family. “I do think if I’d been a boy I wouldn’t have cared as much and there would have been zero expectations. There would not have been the same pressures to fulfil a role, a void that was impossible to fill, of course.”

Alongside this “second shift” – the labour women perform at home once they leave their paid work – there is a third shift, which is less often acknowledged.