This Christmas, I'm Not Doing Stuff (Guest Post by Lucy Huber)

A guest post and a big announcement.

This morning I am delighted to bring to you a guest post from a writer who… might not need an introduction?

Lucy Huber

might be best-known these days for being constantly viral on parenting Twitter, but she is also an editor at McSweeney’s and has previously written for The New Yorker, The Huffington Post, and Time. (The Time article made me cry.) I’m still a little star-struck to say we are friends, in all honesty. (!) And I’m tremendously excited about the news Lucy and I have to share today. More on that at the end!

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Photo by John Matychuk on Unsplash

This December I decided I am not doing Christmas stuff with my kids. I’m not against Christmas. it’s just that for Halloween, we did everything. We went to a Halloween-themed amusement park, we went to three different Fall festivals at farms. We did a Halloween parade and Boo at the Zoo. We trick-or-treated a total of three different times. By the end of October, I was burnt out on Fall Fun. I’d gotten lost in several corn mazes, eaten pumpkin-flavored everything, and pet like 35 different goats. I was tired. The children were tired and full of norovirus. The goats were probably tired. So I decided we wouldn’t do this again in another month when the Christmas activities start rolling in. We were just going to have a nice, chill Christmas season at home, no events, no expectations. Certainly no more trick-or-treating even though I feel like we are only 2-3 years away from someone on social media inventing Christmas trick-or-treating, somehow.

There’s been a lot of discussion online recently about the “mental load of Christmas” and whether it’s fair that moms carry most of it. There seem to be two schools of thought. The first is that it’s unfair how much moms are expected to do at the holidays, that the mental load of the holidays shouldn’t always fall on their shoulders. The second seems to be that there shouldn’t be a mental load at all, that any mom who feels that way is kind of being a Grinch. The second school of thought tends to think she’s putting that on herself, moms don’t have to do anything for Christmas, but they insist on making things too complicated by doing Elf on a Shelf, taking photos with Santa, dressing their kids up for Reindeer Day at school, etc. Or maybe even that she should be doing these things, but she should be enjoying them. And if she doesn’t, there’s something wrong with her, not the holidays.

I kind of agree with both camps, to be quite honest. I do think we as a society have started doing too much for our children at holidays and nobody is going to be harmed by opting out. If I think back to what we did as a kid in December it was mostly just going to get a Christmas tree and then decorating it. And even that didn’t happen until like December 15th. Maybe school put on a concert. We went to church on Christmas Eve and then we opened presents on Christmas morning. We didn’t have dress-up days at school. We didn’t move an elf around the house every night. We didn’t wear matching Christmas pajamas, or have Christmas movie nights with themed snacks. But we still loved Christmas. My favorite memory of Christmas as a kid was huddling up with my brothers in our TV room on Christmas Eve and calling the weather service number, where they would report where their radar spotted Santa in the sky. I really don’t think our kids will remember the photo ops with their head over an elf’s body at the Christmas tree lot. They’ll remember something tiny that you don’t even know they’re thinking about at the time, like the vague feeling of driving home after dark, warm in their car seat, seeing the blur of Christmas lights.

But at the same time, even those little things require someone to put in effort. My mom still had to buy and wrap the Christmas presents, she had to plan Christmas dinner and dress us for church and make sure we got to the Christmas tree lot. Even without the 722 theme days at school (Don’t forget Holiday Pajama Day! And Elf Day, both the magical creature AND dressing like a character from the movie, those are two different days! And Dress like Your Favorite Menorah Candle day, kids! No, you can’t all pick the tall one in the middle!) there is work to be done if you are a mom with children at Christmas time.

There’s this thing online where people post videos of their kids doing something special and caption it “core memory made” and I wonder sometimes if we forget that memories are not videos. We aren’t making memories every time we make content. We can’t actually control what our kids remember at all. That’s terrifying to think about. What if what they remember of Christmas is me yelling at them not to open more than one advent calendar door per day and then giving them extra chocolate chips so they’ll stop crying that I yelled at them? Maybe that’s why we are so obsessed with overdoing everything for holidays now, just throwing everything at the wall to make sure something good sticks.

But the other thing is… I actually do enjoy it. Isn’t this why we all had kids in the first place? So we could give them the things we loved in life, we could pass on the fun and magic of living. We all, at our core, want our kids to feel the good feelings we once felt, too.

Which is why even though at the beginning of December I decided I wasn’t going to do a whole bunch of Christmas stuff with my kids, I find it creeping in anyway. We go to see holiday trains one weekend and then again the next weekend because it was so fun the first time. We go to chop down a Christmas tree at a real Christmas tree farm because we’re going to get one anyway so why not make a day out of it? (FWIW my daughter cried the entire time because she refused to wear gloves and her hands were cold, so maybe that’s why not). We had a Christmas movie night with matching pajamas and pizza on the couch because I really did want them to see Muppet Christmas Carol, it’s a formative piece of media. Perhaps the real mental load is not the doing it but the pressure that everyone remembers it, that it becomes a “core memory”, that we get a photo and put it on Instagram so everyone knows we have participated in Christmas Fun. I think that’s what I really wanted to give up and I think this year, I have. Everything we’ve done this year has been just because it sounded fun. Not all of it has actually been fun (see: my 2-year-old screaming her head off at the Christmas tree farm) but at least they probably will only remember one weird thing, anyway, like me remembering calling the weather to track Santa. And when I think about it, it seems more fun to find out in 20 years what their core memories were than to try to make them myself.

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Lucy Huber is a freelance writer and editor at McSweeney’s. She lives with her husband Matt and their two kids, Elliot (4) and Winifred (2) in Silver Spring, MD. You might know her from Twitter or from IRL, in either case she’s sorry for talking so much. If there is an opportunity to pet a horse, she will take it.

Don’t go away… I still have a big announcement to share! Lucy and I and three of our closest writer friends are launching a new Substack together in January 2025.

The Pomegranate

will feature weekly essays from a team of moms you may have seen on Buzzfeed’s Funniest Parenting Tweets: Lucy Huber,

Kristen Mulrooney

, Lauren Ahmed,

Sarah Radz

and of course moi. We are incredibly excited about this new venture and we hope you’ll join us for the ride! Our first essay goes live in just two weeks.

You can sign up today at the-pom.com to receive emails every time we publish something new. There will be free essays each month and a paid subscription tier as well (because kids are expensive and we have bills to pay).

P.S. I will not be leaving Something Funny, Something True— I’ll just be shifting my parenting-related writing to my editorial role at The Pom! Hope to see you there!