Why the holidays are so depressing for women and mothers
You want to be cheerful. Here's why you get depressed every holiday season instead.
It’s an open secret among online mothers’ groups, but remains a source of immense shame and stigma everywhere else.
Most mothers, and many women, spend some portion of every holiday crying. And many don’t enjoy a single second of the holidays they so diligently sprinkle magic into.
The holidays are profoundly exhausting, and often filled with shame and demoralization. Yet women are expected to perform happiness, and to never, ever act like all they do is work.
It’s a lot like the postpartum period—being told to “enjoy every moment,” even as every moment is isolating and deeply exhausting. And because of the constant pressure to make the time special, if it doesn’t feel special or if something goes wrong, then you’re left feeling like you’ve failed your children, your family, yourself.
Women feel deeply ashamed of the resentment they feel at the holidays. None of us want to admit how hard it is, because in so doing we subject ourselves to shame, judgment, and ridicule. This means that struggling women feel like they’re alone, like it’s uniquely hard for them, like everyone else has their shit together but they don’t.
No wonder so many of us end up depressed and miserable.
Friend, you are not alone. Ending the cycle of holiday shame begins with understanding what’s going wrong each season.
“You have to do this work—but hey, by the way, it doesn’t actually matter”
The holiday shame cycle is not that different from the mom-shaming women get during the rest of the year:
Create pressure for women to do a massive amount of work.
Tell them that work actually doesn’t matter by insisting that they are choosing to do too much.
If they then actually choose to stop doing the work, shame them for not making the holidays sufficiently magical because they are selfish and inept.
And then, no matter what, women feel guilty and terrible. They either work hard and then learn that no one cares (or at least, everyone pretends not to care), or they don’t do the work and are met with judgment and shame.
Motherhood: No matter what you’re doing, it’s wrong, and you’re an entitled, annoying loser.
The holidays as a time to advertise women’s devaluation
We devalue mothers and women year-round. It’s why we think it’s fine to continuously demand more work from mothers, but never to ask dad to cut his golf game short. In a patriarchy, women’s time matters less. And because we frame everything women do as a leisurely, selfish choice (even working outside the home), we think women’s time is infinite. Surely she can find time to squeeze in just one more task!
The holidays put this on full display. We expect women to keep shouldering their unmanageable load, and to add more—all while pretending none of it is work, and performing joy and enjoyment.
When nothing you do matters, and when your very existence as a human being seems not to matter either, when you can work yourself to exhaustion and tears and still no one cares about your needs, it’s hard to feel happy. In many families, the holidays are a deeply humiliating time for women, whose thankless tasks are put on full display, and only met with criticism.
Trauma anniversaries and recurring trauma
The holidays happen at the same time each year. The decor is similar. So too are the fragrances, the events, the sensory experience. Though each holiday is new, it’s also deeply familiar.
Even if this holiday goes well, the season may remind you of traumas past—the death of a family member, being treated abusively by your spouse, the year no one got you anything.
For many, though, the holidays are a time of recurring trauma. The husband who insists his wife doesn’t deserve presents. The extended family who continuously ignores boundaries. The predatory uncle who’s still allowed at Christmas dinner. The trauma compounds, adding up over the years. Each trauma multiplies the effects of each other trauma until you’re wading in a sea of painful memories.
Sexism as a form of trauma
Sexism is trauma.
The only reason we don’t treat it as such is because we think it is normal to treat women as if they matter less than men, and we think women should accept this.
The holidays put sexism on full display, and send it into overdrive, intensifying the trauma of life as a woman in a patriarchal society.
The physiological realities of the holiday season
In the northern hemisphere, the holidays occur during the darkest days of the year. There’s a real biochemical effect here. Lack of light is a trigger for depression and mental illness, and can leave you feeling unhappy even when things are going well. When they’re not, though, the literal darkness can really tip you over into emotional darkness.
There’s also the fatigue and sleep deprivation. Though we like to pretend otherwise, the overwhelming majority of women and mothers work full-time—and most don’t get enough paid leave. So women must make holiday magic while working, and must work as if they don’t have families and tend to their families as if they don’t work. No wonder they’re so tired.
And perhaps most importantly, is the rush of adrenaline and the dopamine crash. Holidays incite panic, and the adrenaline keeps you going. Then, when it’s gone, you may feel exhausted and overwhelmed. If you actually enjoy the holiday—or even just hope to—you may also find yourself experiencing a rush of dopamine. When the holiday is gone, so too is the dopamine, leaving in its wake a mess, maybe some debt, and more work to do.
Is it possible to have a happy holiday in a sexist society?
We intuitively understand that men facing trauma may not be able to think positively to escape it. That’s why we accept that a man’s surgery, family trauma, financial difficulties, or divorce might very well ruin the holiday. We don’t tell men it’s their hormones, or their insistence on doing the wrong things in the wrong way.
So we are, as a culture, capable of understanding that some life experiences make enjoying the holidays impossible, or at least very difficult. It’s just that we don’t think women are allowed to fully feel their feelings, because we think a woman’s primary purpose is to serve, entertain, and cater to others.
So if you hear nothing else, hear this: You don’t have to have a happy holiday.
You can have a bad Christmas or holiday season without scarring your children or ruining your own life. A bad holiday doesn’t mean your life is bad, either. It’s just one day. Please don’t base your entire sense of self, your judgments of your children’s childhood, on one single day.
But what might help?
A decent partner, for one. Most of the problems of the holiday season belong squarely at the feet of men who outsource labor to exhausted women, and who manage to never do their fair share.
You’ll also read a lot about setting boundaries. And yes, you are entitled to draw lines in the sand, but these can be difficult to enforce if your partner is actively undermining you.
For many women, just knowing that this season is brief, and that their exhaustion is not their fault, can offer significant relief.
Readers, have you found anything that helps you navigate the challenges of the holiday a little better?
Honestly? Decades of opting out. I am single and childless. I cannot count the number of men for whom I have cooked christmas dinner and who disappeared by NYE. By the time I was in college spending time with my parents at Christmas became a battle that was impossible to win--my mother kept track of literal minutes and would throw fits if my Dad got more time with us than she did. So I didn't come home. I know that many readers will already have partners and children and I hope that they find joy. I have my own holiday traditions, that I do when I have energy, and don't do when I don't. Do I get sad? Yes. But being sad because of SAD or because my brother is far away or because my friends have stuff to do is in the end far easier to deal with than man-baby sulks, emotional blackmail, gaslighting, the stress of cooking for others, and so on. Normalize opting out for the holidays. Cannot recommend highly enough.
I did many, many years of creating Holiday (both Thanksgiving and Christmas) magic for my 3 children, spouse and extended family. I am now 64, divorced, my children are adults. We still get together for the holidays, and my kids still enjoy it. I detach emotionally and go through the motions, doing as little as possible. It’s not fun or enjoyable, it’s a chore. I tend to blame myself for feeling this way, it feels like there must be something wrong with me. I so appreciate the honesty in your writing, sometimes I wish you could “shout it from the rooftops.”