Must be nice to be a man and feel absolutely zero guilt or concern while you sit on your arse in front of the tv as your wife frantically runs herself into the ground with the never ending grind of holiday cooking/cleaning/gifting/wrapping/decorating/tidying/arranging/crafts/familial politics
it always bewilders and offends me that at family gatherings all of the women are up cleaning, cooking, clearing the table after dinner, bringing snacks out, etc., and all of the men are just relaxing and sitting around. I’m also up cleaning, clearing peoples’ plates, etc., because I’m expected to do that as a female, while my male cousins get to sit around and chill. Even the male relatives that I like just sit around and chat and don’t seem to notice that my sister and I are constantly being called into the kitchen and they’re not.
so anyway yeah if you’re a male you should seriously try to pay attention to who’s doing all the work and who’s allowed to sit and chill (probably you) and maybe like, get up and insist on helping…
I’m sure a LOT of women (if not most) can relate to the experience of loving the holidays as a child only to be unceremoniously snatched up into the kitchen one year, after someone deemed you old enough to join the women.
I was si excited, once again, to go to my grandparents’ for Thanksgiving; my brothers and I knew everything we would do: watch the parades on TV (as usual), play board games or play outside (as usual), get cleaned up five minutes before sitting down to be served dinner (as usual), then excuse ourselves after the pie and go watch the animated tv specials until it was time to get in the car and fall asleep on the way home (all as usual).
I will NEVER forget the painful shock of being taken by the shoulders that day and steered into the kitchen, where I spent the holiday prepping the meal and serving the meal and cleaning up after the meal, while my brothers had no change in their holiday schedule.
I was 11 years old.
Don’t forget to show the children what it takes to put on a meal (and who’s doing it).
and this is true not just for holidays but also any time guests come over. i have observed far too many men offer food/drinks to their guests, even insist when they refuse without realising that its the women who will have to actually make it.
and often, the women are the last to sit and eat. So when you are being hospitable and insisting that your fellow male guests take one more serving, you may not realise that there won’t be enough for the women.
And i think a lot of the times this is subconscious. So please from now on, be more aware… and make and effort to stop this ‘tradition’
