Let’s force men to split Christmas jobs 50/50!

THERE is every chance my husband still believes in Santa Claus. Things do, after all, magically keep appearing all around him every Christmas. Cards, with personal messages already inscribed to the recipient, that he just has to sign. Little presents for unexpected guests and their children are conjured as if from nowhere when they drop by.

And on Christmas Day itself – why, you would hardly believe it! – presents for absolutely everyone appear, ready-wrapped, with gift tags, all miraculously appropriate to the recipient.

And in the middle of the day, enough food to feed an army emerges from the kitchen and arrives on a table laid with shining silver and crockery and holly-sprigged napkins that exist for one day only and are not seen again until they are summoned forth by the spirits next Yuletide. Truly, it is the most wonderful time of the year.

I’m going to let you in on a little secret. It’s not Father Christmas. It’s me! I do it! Like most women in most families, I do it. My husband thinks he does Christmas because he goes to Hamleys after work one evening and buys our little boy’s Big Present every year and once pushed the Send button on an Ocado order.

But he doesn’t do Christmas. The workload is way bigger than that, and 99 per cent of it is done by me. I start in January, restocking my depleted cards and wrapping- paper resources along with my drawer of Generic Yet Thoughtful-Looking Presents For Unexpected Guests And Their Children in the sales.

I pick up other gifts for family and friends all year round. From October, I start adding extra bottles of booze, boxes of chocolates and tins of biscuits to my trolley as I do the weekly shop. I keep the rolling list of people we need to send cards and presents to updated in my mind and their addresses on a spreadsheet.

In November I start writing cards and organising my work commitments in such a way that I can cope with the upcoming onslaught of additional tasks – our son’s nativity costume (PLEASE let him not have any lines to learn – the year he played part of a fence around the stable was a godsend), tree-buying and decorating, keeping the house from descending into complete chaos as childish excitement and sleeplessness builds. And then it’s December itself, and we all know how that goes.

It’s almost as if Christmas were just a heightened version of every other day of the year. It functions (in among the joy and the all-round gorgeousness) as an annual reminder of how unequally some things are shared.

The Royal Statistical Society released figures last week showing that, globally, women do 75 per cent of the world’s unpaid labour; and most of it is a lot more onerous than digging out the festive napkins from whatever corner you shoved them in last year.

Every January I always promise myself that between now and next Christmas, I will redistribute every domestic task so that, by December 25, my husband and I are working in seamless harmony, a burden shared becoming no burden at all.

I will teach him to separate whites from darks and put a load of washing on. Proper pegging out techniques take time to teach and learn, but I will consider it an investment in my future sanity and we will do it. Ditto cooking beyond bolognese and jacket potatoes. Fun, Yule-specific skills such as wrapping and sprout-prepping will be his glorious reward at the end of a year of foundational learning.

Join me, won’t you? There’s got to be strength in numbers. Join me in this programme of ensuring fair and equal allocation of l abour, of unlearning learned helplessness, of kicking oblivious other halves up their backsides.

Let’s make 2020 the year of 50: 50. Merry Christmas!