A friend (the one with the baby-gear spreadsheet) had her baby recently, and I took a shepherd’s pie round. It got me thinking about Mary (as in mother of Jesus) and what she really thought about all that frankincense and myrrh. I reckon she’d have preferred the shepherds to bring the lambs in pie-form. If the birth of Jesus actually happened, there are some gaping omissions in the bible account of it. I don’t imagine Mary had such a fine time giving birth in a draughty stable after lumbering around on a donkey all day. And there’s no mention of her swearing at Joseph. Women have always had a hard time at Christmas and it begins with her. I was ranting to a friend in a same-sex relationship about blokes in straight relationships never doing their share of writing Christmas cards, and she said, quite pertinently, “Women send cards because they want to receive them. Networking, being remembered and acknowledged, all of that matters more to women than it does men. So men don’t bother because, in essence, they’re not bothered.” So many of the rituals around Christmas are things that get done, usually by women, out of habit or obligation, not necessarily because we want to do them. I think that answers the question ‘Why do women turn into frothing lunatics at Christmas?’ Somehow we’ve bought into the idea that we were responsible for recreating the perfect Christmas for everyone else. Where has that come from? Look again at the Christmas story. All the attention on the baby and the visiting men. But who had actually done all the hard work?