In no particular order:
It’s a hell of a lot more fun, joyful, easy and manageable to host and travel with children around the holidays when a) they have many other children to play with and b) there is an essentially endless supply of adults and older cousins available to take care of any one kid. Turns out collective caregiving comes pretty naturally to young children, especially if they’ve been used to it since birth. If they can’t find either of their parents, they’ll quickly turn to asking a random person to open something for them, give them water, help them with the toilet. I know this won’t be a surprise to anyone in my Substack neck of the woods. But it really was a striking visualisation of what multi-age playgroups and having 14 different caregivers in one day actually look like in (chaotic) practice. The biggest downside to this is that everyone then goes back to their individual households, and suddenly there isn’t two dozen arms flung out to hold your baby when you need a break and they won’t let you sit down.
Being in one house with 30+ people really makes it obvious who’s doing the work. In individual households, people (typically men) nurture the illusion that they do just as much, because the work is more spread out, across a wider variety of tasks and in different spaces. But at Christmas, most of the work revolves around food — buying food, making menus, setting tables, cooking food, cleaning tables, making more food, loading and unloading the dishwasher, making yet more food. So it becomes really clear. You see the uncle who’s busy offering his help and the one for whom this is clearly outside the remit of what he considers his responsibility. They might think we don’t see them, but we do. And, just a word of warning, we ARE gonna chat shit about them on the post-breakfast walk.
Relatedly, when people say, ‘just don’t do it’, ‘just opt out’ when it comes to Christmas magic-making, they don’t account for the fact that the people, they gotta eat. In large families who love being together for Christmas, because it is beautiful and lovely and a precious and privileged thing to be able to do, and implying you don’t decline to host altogether, most of the work involved is not skippable. Of course, there’s making the tree and wrapping presents and everything but if anything, that’s the fun bit. If you’re having 30+ people over, they be hungry. Like, all the time.
The pronatalist feminists of Substack would have loved my family Christmas. 2 pregnant women, 1 wedding announcement, four toddlers, two babies, a lot of boys doing care work, my cousin deciding he wants to become a nurse. It wasn’t perfect, but… Are we healing???
Spice proportions cannot be proportionally multiplied. If a recipe says 1 tsp of curry paste for five people, do not put 6 tsp for thirty. It will be exponentially spicy. I learned this the hard way.
Boys are naturals with babies too once given the opportunity. Some of my cousins maybe had a moment of apprehension before being handed my sister’s baby for the first time, and from then on, they were taking him everywhere, making him giggle, rocking him to sleep, fighting to get to hold him.
If you hear a crying baby on a train, plane, or beach, turning around and looking accusingly in the direction of its parents, or letting out a really loud sigh, is not going to make it cry less. A five-month-old is not going to be swayed in the expression of its needs just because the woman in 22C is theatrically irritated. You’re of course allowed to be annoyed — hate to break it to you but the parents are themselves not having a blast — but the best thing you can do is absolutely nothing. Go about your music, your movie, your book. Just don’t turn around.
You can have the most internally equal partnership when it comes to childcare, the inequality is still going to catch up to you externally. By default, people will still ask the mum where things are (mostly, the pacifier — “Où est la tétine??” wins top prize for most asked question of Christmas 2025) or how to soothe her baby. It will gradually get better as hands-on dads like my brother-in-law make it visibly known that they, too, can do those things, that they, too, can be asked. But it takes time for their example to settle into common practice.
Care work is primarily valuable because it participates in the continuation of life, and because it creates conditions in which people feel nice. That’s what it’s for. I think we don’t repeat this enough, because Discourse around domestic labour to the tune of ‘just don’t do it’ often unfairly associates those tasks with an unnecessary or superficial desire for cleanliness, neatness, vacuous aesthetics, as if those things not being paid attention to won’t affect anyone. But that doesn’t do justice to the fact that being in nice, clean, welcoming, Christmassy spaces make people feel good! Having several different spaces with tables and chairs set up for board games and coffee chats, for example, allows for beautiful and spontaneous moments of intergenerational exchange, laughter, merrymaking, collective care, without anyone awkwardly standing to the side or feeling excluded. But that implied my mum doing prior thinking, preparation, shuffling furniture, going to ask the neighbour for some extra chairs. So these things matter. They are not superfluous. As often with care, they’re the crucial infrastructure that allows for human relationships to freely flow and flourish.
Extra joy is never wasted. We had two grandparents from the other sides of two families join our Christmas because they otherwise would have spend it alone. It was a bit tricky, required some reshuffling, but it was so worth it.
My mum is a care magician. That’s it, that’s the lesson. She’s always five steps ahead of everyone. And that magic doesn’t come from the sky, by the way, it’s actually a euphemistic way to say she has incredible care skills, developed over decades of practice building her family, hosting, tending to people’s needs. Because we’ll say it as many times as it takes: nothing about care work is innate to a particular group of people. You learn by doing, you learn by imitating. Care, like cooking or driving a car, involves a diverse set of skills and reflexes you can’t have if you’ve never tried your hand at it, or if you’ve never carefully observed someone else do it. Not knowing is not a reason not to do something. Ask. Observe. Do. Fuck up. Do again. As parents, model care work to your kids. If you have an open house policy, they’ll be better at hosting. If you mix friend groups and family all the time, they’ll have no problem doing the same.
Strollers do surprisingly well in the mud, and nothing rocks a baby to sleep like being pushed through the bumps, roots, rocks and puddles of French Brittany. 10/10 soother.
I hope everyone had a caring holiday season. Excited for what this year will bring for care politics and for our collective recognition of care as the central support system upon which our world rests.
& Happy new year!!
— MM
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