Divide up the Labor of the Holiday Season With This Simple Chart

When the mental load is unbalanced, everyone’s less happy. Use this list to make sure that doesn’t apply to you.

Illustration: Caitlin Keegan

It’s coming up on that time of year again: The sprint of lavish meals, family traditions, charitable gestures, sparkly decorations, just-right gifts, religious rituals, and neighborhood cookie swaps that transform the year-end darkness into a cozy, glittering time of good cheer. But put down that mulled wine for a minute and consider: Exactly who makes all that holiday happiness happen? (No, it’s not Santa.)

For me, it began early this November. My family was invited to spend Thanksgiving with friends, and it quickly became obvious that I and the other mother would be doing all the planning for the festive meal. I volunteered for green bean casserole, cranberry sauce, and stuffing, and almost immediately grew overwhelmed at all I’d have to do. Thanksgiving comes at the tail end of a work week. When would I have time to find recipes, write a shopping list, and go to the store, let alone get the actual cooking done?

I added these items to my running mental list of tasks, but I didn’t think to bring them up with my husband, who, in turn, didn’t think to inquire what we were bringing.

There we were again, even though I’m literally an expert on the division of household labor — I’m a journalist and psychologist who wrote an entire book about the feminist promise of equitable domestic partnership, and how often it dissolves in practice, called All the Rage: Mothers, Fathers, and the Myth of Equal Partnership. So I know intimately how closely gender equity is connected with the self-reported happiness in a marriage.

Here’s something else I know from my research: that equity doesn’t happen by default. Successful couples understand that without great attention, most of the work of their homes would (in heterosexual households) automatically default to the woman. That’s true of both the physical housework and the mental load, a concept perhaps best articulated in a cartoon by the French artist Emma that went viral in 2017. She writes: “[T]he mental load means always having to remember.”