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Christmas Mothers: Why Are They Hiding Their Work Behind an Old White Man? (Column)

2020-12-25T17:46:57.775Z


In no other month of the year are mothers so little emancipated as in December: They bake, decorate, wrap gifts - and voluntarily blame all of this on an old white man.


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Mrs. Claus: Why are we actually hiding behind an old white man at Christmas?

Photo: Lubitz + Dorner / plainpicture

In this exhausting Corona year, I was actually early with my gifts: I had already bought the marzipan for my father and the Christmas plate for my mother at the end of October, and I had also worked through my son's very long wish list.

By December 1st, I had put together 24 small gifts for the Advent calendar, decorated the apartment, baked cookies for relatives, painted and sent cards for friends and neighbors, and decorated the tree.

I was so proud of myself that I just packed my Christmas presents in the basement at the beginning of December.

I would still find time to wrap up, I thought.

A mistake.

Photo: Lina Moreno / DER SPIEGEL

Sarah Wiedenhöft

, 28, is a freelance journalist and doctoral candidate.

As a young, queer, single mother of a black child, she is often confronted with prejudice.

In her column she writes how she deals productively with the injustices of everyday life.

Yes, some people suspected that the so-called lockdown light would not be enough, I wasn't one of them.

So now my son was at home from mid-December, I had to take over homeschooling again and prepare for Christmas, that is, to wrap presents.

In the past few years, I've always done this when my son was at school.

Unfortunately he is a Christmas master detective: he finds every chocolate bar between the toilet paper rolls, although I thought it was safe here.

And he tracks down every present in my closet if he's only home alone for five minutes.

Whenever I call his grandmother and talk about "Christmas" and "presents", he rushes through the apartment and sits down next to me.

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Source: spiegel

All news articles on 2020-12-25

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