I love making homemade gifts for many reasons. One, they’re meaningful. Two, in the leaner years, they’re good gifts that are budget-friendly. Three, what do you give the people who have everything, amiright?
It never fails, though. Except for two years, November and December find me scrambling. (One year I started in February, and in 2020, I was happily sewing through the summer for Christmas. Rock on, me!) I’ve had making going into Christmas Eve some years. This is especially tough when my husband decides he wants to do homemade gifts (like jerky) and waits until December 23rd to start it.
This year I’m making some stuff, buying other things. We were in the financial situation to be able to pull this off. It’s hard to want to make things when you’re not sure how they’ll be received. My mom is the executor of my aunt’s estate, and as we (mostly Dad and her) were cleaning out her house, we found gifts, unused. When I was going through the kitchen, I found dipping oil and soup we’d made and gifted. My mom returned to me the shopping bags I’d sewn and knitted for my aunt, the tag with the washing instructions still on the knitted market bag and the homemade produce bags still inside, still stark white and unblemished. So much work for someone I cared about. 🙁
Know what makes Christmas magical? The hours of labor that women produce. Gifts, cards, decorating, cooking… All on women. Arranging for the kids to see Santa and taking the pictures… Moms. Planning, shopping, being mindful of the budget… It’s the women. Figuring out when we’ll be seeing family… Still women. And who arranges the babysitter for those parties that aren’t kid-friendly? Did you say women? You’re right!
On top of that, I’d be making. A lot of years we do some fun and fancy canning with gifting as our motivation. I’m not talking randomly pulling a jar of broth or soup. (Okay, except for that tomato soup. That shit’s top-level good, and I made a batch just to can and give away.) I make this one jam that is crazy-popular and we make these pickled jalapenos that are soooo good when they’re on top of that jam on top of cream cheese on top of a cracker. We make barbecue sauce some years. This year it’s special mustards. And that’s a lot of work for one person.
Most years, I’ve produced dozens of jars of lovely canned goods, and when I’ve asked my husband what he’s giving his family for Christmas, he’s come back with, “I thought I’d just make up a gift with ________,” and he’ll start rattling off jars of things on the rack. This year I put a stop to that. Fancy mustards take hours per batch, and I declared I wasn’t sharing. I wasn’t letting my husband steal my labor to get out of thinking intentionally about his family’s Christmas gifts, especially after last year revealed they hardly think of my daughters and me as family at all.
Maybe things started changing in July. Women as a collective started realizing we could take up our own space without yielding it. It dawned on us that our words are valuable and we don’t have to let men take them away from us by interrupting or talking over us. We realized that, damnit!, we are smart with brilliant ideas, and we don’t need men to be mansplaining shit to us. (Don’t you just love it when men want to tell you about your own area of expertise?) Women discovered that, yes, we’ve had to be strong individually, but when we all come together, we are a force.
This woman right here decided not to allow men to take anything else from her. Not even my husband, who I love with every fiber of my being, gets to continue to take from me. In September I wrote a letter to his brother, another big taker. I called out his taking and declared he wasn’t going to get by with taking anything else. I wasn’t going to put up with his verbal abuse anymore. Let’s just say that Christmas might be pretty lit this year.
I know it’s pushing time. We’re nine days out from Christmas and perhaps you’ve just gone along with the giving and taking care of everything because it seems easier than pushing back. And at this point, maybe it just doesn’t seem worth it. I get it. If I hadn’t gotten a few months’ head start, I would keep cruising through to get past Christmas, but I’d start planning ahead for next year, start thinking about steps I want to take and boundaries I’ll be putting up.
In my next post, I’ll give suggestions on how to create those shifts. Until next time, lovely people.
