There’s a meme making the rounds this season—something that’s resonated so deeply it’s sparked conversations across kitchen tables and comment sections alike: Most of what we call holiday magic is actually just the invisible labor of women.

The Triple Shift Comes to Town

Journalist Judith Shulevitz used the term “triple shift” to describe what happens during the holidays—women don’t just carry their usual paid work and the already-disproportionate share of domestic labor. We add an entire third shift of magic-making, tradition-keeping, and memory-creating work that happens in kitchens while everyone else watches football, or late at night while children sleep, arranging presents just so beneath trees we probably picked out, bought, transported, and decorated ourselves.

Research backs this up in ways that are both validating and exhausting. Women already perform the bulk of emotional labor—that psychological phenomenon of unpaid, often unnoticed work that goes into keeping everyone around you comfortable and happy. But during the holidays, this work doesn’t just increase incrementally. It explodes. There are more mental lists to juggle, more commitments to track, more tasks to delegate (and then often complete ourselves when delegation fails). There’s more pressure to make things magical for everyone else.

Here’s what the research shows us: In heterosexual dual-income households, women still perform approximately 70% of household labor. Add children, and that percentage climbs. Add the holidays, and suddenly Mom is running an unpaid event planning empire that would put Martha Stewart to shame.

The Cognitive Labor of Christmas

Let’s talk about what this actually looks like, because I think we’ve become so accustomed to women doing this work that we’ve forgotten how extensive it is.

The holiday mental load includes:

• Remembering everyone who needs a gift (including your partner’s side of the family, often)
• Tracking what each person would actually want
• Researching, purchasing, and wrapping those gifts
• Managing your own family’s wish lists
• Coordinating schedules across multiple households
• Planning and executing meals (not just cooking—the entire cognitive architecture of menu planning, grocery shopping, timing multiple dishes)
• Decorating (which requires remembering where decorations are stored, assessing what needs replacing, and coordinating the aesthetic)
• Maintaining family traditions (which someone has to remember exist in the first place)
• Managing the emotions of everyone around you when things don’t go perfectly
• Creating the experience of “magic” while rendering your own labor completely invisible

Sociologist Allison Daminger’s research on cognitive labor identified four distinct types of mental work that households require: anticipating needs, identifying solutions, monitoring results, and decision making. During the holidays, all four types intensify dramatically. And while men may show up for the decision-making stage—the one type marginally shared—they’re conspicuously absent from the anticipating, researching, and monitoring work that makes informed decisions possible. Women carry those three invisible stages alone.

The Santa Claus Problem

Here’s something deliciously ironic: We’ve literally created a mythos where an old man in a costume takes credit for women’s work.

Think about it. Who remembers which child wants which specific toy? Who researches which stores have it in stock? Who drives to three different Targets across town? Who wraps it at 11 PM on Christmas Eve? Who arranges it perfectly beneath the tree? Who acts delighted when the child thanks Santa?

And look—I get the magic of Santa Claus for kids. What I don’t love is how perfectly the Santa myth encapsulates our cultural comfort with making women’s labor invisible. We’ve created an entire holiday infrastructure built on the premise that magic just happens, that joy simply materializes, that traditions maintain themselves.

They don’t. Someone is doing that work. Usually several someones. And those someones are disproportionately women.

Why This Matters Beyond the Holidays

The holiday labor imbalance isn’t just about December exhaustion (though that alone would be enough to address). It’s a concentrated example of how we systematically undervalue and render invisible the work that makes life livable, relationships functional, and families connected.

When we dismiss this as “optional” work that women are “choosing” to do, we miss several crucial points:

First, much of this labor isn’t actually optional if you want to maintain family connections and create positive experiences for children. Someone has to do it. The question is why that someone is almost always Mom.

Second, there are real consequences when women don’t do this work—from disappointed relatives to feeling like they’ve somehow failed at creating “family magic.” Men rarely face the same social penalties for not sending holiday cards or forgetting to coordinate the family photo.

Third, this isn’t about individual women being perfectionists or Pinterest martyrs. Research on gender ideology and household labor consistently shows that even couples who identify as egalitarian still default to heavily gendered divisions of labor, especially around holidays and family-focused tasks. This is a structural issue, not a personal failing.

What Actually Helps

So what do we do with this information besides nod knowingly and pour another glass of wine?

Here’s what the research—and my work with couples—suggests actually creates change:

Stop doing it. Seriously. What happens if you just… don’t send the cards this year? Don’t make the elaborately themed cookies? Don’t coordinate the matching family pajamas? Often, the catastrophe we imagine never materializes. And if someone is disappointed? That’s valuable information about whose expectations you’ve been carrying.

Transfer ownership, not tasks. Don’t ask your partner to “help” with your family’s gift shopping. Say, “You’re in charge of all gifts for your family this year—figuring out what they want, ordering it, wrapping it, and shipping it on time.” Full ownership means they carry the cognitive load, not just the execution.

Need a practical tool to make task ownership visible and trackable? The Tend Task app helps couples clearly assign and monitor who owns what—so holiday responsibilities (and everything else) stop defaulting to Mom.

Let it be imperfect on someone else’s watch. If your partner takes ownership of Christmas dinner and the timing is off or they forget the cranberry sauce, resist the urge to fix it. The learning happens in the consequences, not in you swooping in to save it.

Stop performing invisible labor. If you’ve been secretly tracking everyone’s schedules, quietly buying gifts “from both of us,” or managing holiday logistics without discussing them, stop. Let the gap become visible. Let someone else notice.

Redistribute by who has time and energy, not by gender. Who’s actually less slammed right now? Who has fewer work commitments in December? Those are better criteria than “women do the decorating and men do the… tree? Maybe?”

Name what you’re not doing anymore. “I’m not doing holiday cards this year” is more sustainable than trying to get your partner to help with your holiday cards. Just opt out of the things that drain you. If they matter to someone else, that someone else can own them.

The Deeper Question

But here’s what I really want us to sit with: Why are we comfortable, as a culture, with the idea that holiday magic should be women’s work in the first place?

Why have we accepted a paradigm where men are positioned as the grateful recipients of holiday joy rather than equal participants in creating it? Where Dad gets credit for “helping” with tasks Mom is expected to manage entirely? Where the labor that creates family connection, childhood wonder, and adult tradition is feminized to the point of invisibility?

These aren’t rhetorical questions. They’re invitations to examine the assumptions operating in our own homes, our own relationships, our own holiday plans.

An Invitation for This Season

As you move through these next weeks, I’m curious what might shift if you approached holiday labor the way you would a project at work—with clear ownership, specific deliverables, and shared accountability.

What if, instead of “helping” with the holidays, your partner actually owned entire domains of the experience?

What if you gave yourself permission to name the cognitive labor you’re carrying and ask for it to be redistributed?

What if creating holiday magic was understood as a collective family responsibility rather than Mom’s unpaid third shift?

You’re already doing so much more than you probably give yourself credit for. The fact that you’re reading this suggests you have the awareness to create something different. Not perfect—different. More sustainable. More equitable. More honest about whose labor makes the magic possible.

Because here’s what I know from both research and lived experience: The most magical thing we can give our families isn’t a perfect holiday. It’s a model of partnership where everyone’s contributions are visible, valued, and fairly distributed.

And if that means Santa needs to learn how to plan a menu and coordinate family schedules? Well, he’s had a good run taking credit for women’s work. Time for an upgrade.

What invisible labor are you carrying this season? I’d love to hear what resonates—and what you’re experimenting with changing. Send me an email.