Christmas, consumption and care in the family

Who’s responsible for the ‘perfect’ Christmas?

Christmas time is family time—whether you like it or not.

For some, relaxing with loved ones is great. But for others, enforced togetherness intensifies feelings of frustration and confinement.

The holiday season can be stressful, especially for the women who are supposed to create the perfect experience. Exhausted women are shopping for a dinner worthy of social media and doing the heavy lifting of buying and wrapping presents.

Love is measured by price tags. Children’s expectations are stoked by companies who use emotional blackmail to flog us more stuff. 

The happy ending of every Christmas film depends on restoring or recognising a “family”. But behind the sentimental myths of Christmas traditions, the shape of the family constantly evolves.

One of the most dramatic changes occurred in the Industrial Revolution.

The production of commodities moved from the home to the factory. Women could no longer care for their children while they worked. They either took children to work in dangerous conditions or paid someone to care for them. Birth rates tumbled. Children died.

Capitalism destroyed the old patriarchal household. But the bosses used the ideology associated with the old family, such as religious ideas about female inferiority, to impose a new family structure.

The repackaging of these entrenched ideologies means that women’s oppression appears to be eternal and natural.

The capitalist class was not only motivated by a patriarchal ideology—it had a material interest in ensuring supplies of labour power.

For many working women and men, the only achievable option was to fight for a “family wage”. This meant women could stay at home and care for their children because their husbands were paid enough to support them.

The family wage was never a reality. Women always had to work, whether it was waged labour or in the informal economy of washing, taking in lodgers and caring for other women’s children.

So the family constantly changes. Today’s grandparents grew up when gay sex was illegal and divorce was a scandal.

Now, many people have “blended families”, which embrace children from different partners. Some children have LGBT+ parents. And lots of children grow up in single parent households.

But capitalism still needs the unpaid labour of women in the family to reproduce the labour force. All the cooking, cleaning and caring allows people to function and perform each day.

Raising children and caring for the sick or the elderly is extremely labour intensive. Most of this is still done by women, with no extra cost to the bosses.

The Oxfam charity says that women carry out 12.5 billion hours of unpaid care work internationally every day. And every cut to child or welfare services or benefits piles responsibility back onto women in the home.

As well as reproduction, the family is also an important unit of consumption. Families are told they should aspire to have air fryers and juicers. It’s at Christmas when we get caught up in buying piles of presents we don’t need.

The family also plays an ideological role. It both promotes and justifies the idea that men are the providers and women are the carers.

Women have fewer children than they used to, and growing numbers choose to be child-free.

But juggling work and childcare, alongside the assumption that all women will have babies, means women are still overwhelmingly concentrated in “caring” jobs. These are often low-paid and part time.

We might love our own family, but the family as an institution is the material basis of women’s oppression.

So, this year resist the temptation to feel judged by the quality of your stuffing. And don’t feel responsible for the impossible task of giving everyone their “best Christmas ever”.

But remember, rebelling against the sexist system is not just for Christmas—it’s for life.