Making fun of dads at Christmas – it adds to the joy
The Fatherhood Institute says that children’s books that portray dads as incompetent when it to comes to domestic tasks should be banned for being sexist. (What isn’t?) It should be a priority for popular culture to cease peddling outdated stereotypes and stop making fun of inept males, apparently.
I don’t want to be unkind, chaps, but this may not be the ideal time of year to press your case. What do men do at Christmas? A genuine question. It’s more of a mystery than baby Jesus and the Immaculate Conception. I mean, what do men do, apart from asking at 5.35 on Christmas Eve: “Darling, what have we got for my mother?”, or “Where did you put the Stilton?”
Dads have certainly come a long way in my lifetime and most will now change a nappy and contrive not to let the offspring electrocute themselves while Mummy is out. It’s marvellous. But let’s not pretend that Christmas is anything other than a vast, knackering enterprise for which someone called
Father takes all the credit
while Mother does the work. Nick may turn up for the Nativity play but, chances are, Mrs Claus will have bought tinsel for her angel’s halo or fashioned the shepherd’s Yasser Arafat headdress out of a tea towel. I remember a little girl called Rachel in my son’s class saying: “There must be a Father Christmas because mummies couldn’t do everything by themselves.” But they do, sweetheart, they do.
We shop and we wrap and we buy the Sellotape that everyone else will steal. And we chop and we dice. And we are so happy to do it, just as our mothers did for us. Because love, like mincemeat, will keep for years.
Only one small thing do we ask: please don’t expect us to stop making fun of men.