Abby Eckel is over sending family Christmas cards, blaming the “mental load” it adds to the flurrying holiday season.
“I did it once — and it was the first and last time,” Eckel, a mother of two, tells TODAY.com, adding, “Never again.”
Eckel proclaimed that “Christmas cards just aren’t a priority for me” in a TikTok video.
“My husband asked me one year why we didn’t do Christmas cards and he has never asked me again since,” Eckel said in the video. “We had done Christmas cards one year and that was when our oldest was a baby and my husband was like, ‘Why don’t you ever do Christmas cards? You should do Christmas cards.’ I was like, ‘Yeah, I mean, it’s just cards, right? — why don’t you do the Christmas cards?’”
Eckel launched into the explanation she gave her husband.
“I said, ‘So then you can source the photographer and then you can find a date that aligns with her and with our schedules, and then you can decide on what kind of clothes we should all wear and the location and then you can pay her and then you can pick the edits and then you can find whatever website you want to use to print out the Christmas cards, choose which picture or pictures you want to put on there, what you’re going to say, then gather up everybody’s mailing addresses that you want to send them to —your side and mine — then go buy the envelopes for them, then address them, then go to the post office and get all the stamps that you’re going to need, then mail them out.’”
According to Eckel, her husband was surprised by how much planning Christmas cards required.
“He was like, ‘Huh?’” Eckel said in the video. “I was like, ‘Yeah. It’s not just Christmas cards is it?’”
Eckel concluded, “The mental load behind Christmas cards has never seemed worth it to me. Anybody that I would send a Christmas card to, I see regularly. If you don’t see me regularly, then you wouldn’t be getting a Christmas card from me to begin with. That is what the mental load of sending out Christmas cards is.”
In the comments, most of the moms rejected Christmas cards.
- “I did them for 10+ years. I told him to do them two years ago and nothing happened. There have not been Christmas cards since then.”
- “My partner said he would do them last year because I hadn’t in years. He changed his mind real quick when he realized how much work they are.”
- “I do this every year. The mental load is real. You didn’t mention picking the card template. That’s such a roadblock for me. And all this has to be done before the postal cutoff time.”
- “‘Why don’t we’ always means ‘You.’”
- “I wouldn’t even tell him all the steps. Just let him find out for himself.”
- “How cherished are they, really? Family sometimes sends us cards and I go, ‘Cool’ and then go throw it away.”
- “‘You should’ is like when my boss says, ‘Someone should.’”
- “I think this is my favorite Christmas story. Always a classic.”
- “This gave me PTSD.”
- “And it’s a minimum of $100.”
Eckel, a mother of two in Kansas City, Kansas, tells TODAY.com that when her eldest child was an infant, she decided to mail Christmas cards with a family photo.
Her mom would occasionally send store-bought Christmas cards but never with family photos, however Eckel’s friends did.
With a new child of her own, Eckel thought to herself, “I feel like I have to do this.”
“Everyone wanted to see the baby and hear the updates about the baby,” says Eckel, whose kids are now 7 and 9.
The process of sending Christmas cards — taking a photo, tracking down addresses and crafting a cute greeting — was “entirely too much work,” she says, especially for people who didn’t need an “update” on her family.
A few years ago, Eckel’s husband innocently inquired about the abandoned tradition when they found their one and only Christmas card. His question — “Why don’t you ever do Christmas cards?” — left Eckel in amazement.
“My husband is so involved, so I thought, ‘How have you never thought about this?’” she says.
Eckel says after their first child was born, she and her husband operated in stereotypically gendered roles.
“It didn’t make sense because we both worked full-time,” she says. Eckel told her husband, “I can’t do all this. We need to figure this out” and the couple improved their system.
“It’s been a constant … conversation as our jobs have changed, we’ve added kids, moved houses and got dogs,” she adds.
Anyone begrudgingly planning Christmas cards has permission to “let it go,” says Eckel.