Done With December: Group Chats, Office Party Planning and Cancelled Christmas

The advice column where we say what your therapist can't. (Because licensing.)

I asked for letters. I got resignation notices.

And nobody cried. That's the part that got me. Usually there's at least one woman writing in from the floor of her kitchen and this month, nothing. Just flat. Four women, all of them done, and most of them weren't really asking me anything. They'd already decided. They just wanted somebody to look at it and say yeah, that's real.

Fine. I looked. Three of them are right.

The third one I'm taking outside.

And before anybody writes in about it, I know I have no business lecturing anyone about December. I complained about a fourteen-foot pre-lit tree at Costco for three straight weeks and then I put it in my cart. There's a bin in my garage with FALL written on it in marker. I lit a candle called Harvest Kitchen in July, in my own house, on purpose, while my kids were home. So we're all sick here. I just have a column.

“I stopped planning the office party and they cancelled Christmas.”

There are two women in my department. Two. Every year we do the holiday lunch, we run the Secret Santa, we buy the tape and the paper, we book the room, and then we clean the room. This year we just didn't say anything. My boss asked for a show of hands twice. The second time he was looking right at me. Then he announced we were passing on it this year, and nobody else picked it up, and now somehow I'm the reason there's no Christmas.

Done Being The Office Wife, Mississauga

Girl. You didn't cancel Christmas. You ran an experiment and the results came back very badly for men.

Because look at what happened. Fifteen people wanted a party. Fifteen grown adults, all of them with hands, calendars, and a Superstore within driving distance, and the entire holiday fell over because two of them sat still. That's not a party. That was staffing.

The bit I want you to keep is the second show of hands. He asked twice. He looked right at you the second time. He wasn't checking for enthusiasm, honey, he was checking whether you'd fold, and when you didn't, Greg found out he can live without Christmas. Which is more than Greg has ever told anybody about himself in fifteen years of working there.

So next year, when it comes back around, and it's coming back around: “I'm not organizing it this year. I'd love to come.” Say it nicely. Nice is what makes it land. Then stop talking. Don't fill the gap. The gap is doing all the work and you're getting paid either way.

And when somebody mentions the department doesn't feel very festive lately, agree with them. Say it's such a shame. Then sit there and watch nobody fix it.

“My in-laws bought the elf after I said no.”

I told them we weren't doing Elf on the Shelf. I said it more than once, clearly. They bought it anyway and handed it to my five-year-old at a party, in front of everyone, so I couldn't say no. So last December I moved a small plastic man around my house every night for twenty-four nights while my husband slept. One night I hid him in the fridge just to get a break. My son has already asked when he's coming back.

Done With The Elf, Barrie

The fridge? Sweetheart, that's amateur hour. Freezer. Back corner, behind the peas from 2019. “Oh no, he got frozen.” That's four days off, minimum, and nobody can prove anything.

But let's be accurate about what you've got in your house, because you keep calling it a toy and it isn't one. It's a product from 2005 with 1950s packaging designed to look like something your grandmother did. Your grandmother did not do this. Your grandmother had a nativity set she never moved once and a bowl of nuts nobody was allowed to touch.

So your in-laws didn't buy your kid a gift. They bought you twenty-four nights of unpaid theatre, handed it over in public so you couldn't say no in front of people, and then drove home to a house with no elf in it. They hired you, girl, and they didn't even do the interview.

Two sentences, use both. To the kid, at breakfast, totally calm: “Our house isn't on the elf route.” Kids will take logistics. Kids will argue with feelings all day long, but logistics they accept.

To the in-laws, at the next party, in front of the same audience they used on you: “He's your elf. You're welcome to come move him.” Say it delighted. Say it like you're doing them a favour.

They won't come. They were never coming. That was the whole idea.

“My mother buys me sweaters I did not ask for.”

My mother is 71. Every year I send her a list with links on it and every year she ignores it. Last Christmas it was three sweaters in the wrong size, no gift receipts, and when I said something she told me I could exchange them at the mall. The mall is forty minutes away. I'm tired of pretending to like things. Do I tell her before December this year to just stop buying me anything?

Done Pretending, Calgary

No.

Girl, sit down.

I've read this thing four times looking for the crime and I can't find it. A seventy-one-year-old woman went to a store. In December. In Calgary. In the cold. And she picked out three things she thought would look nice on her daughter and she paid for them with her own money. And you sat down and typed a complaint about it to a magazine.

Bitch, be happy. She bought you something. That's the whole story.

Is it annoying? Sure. Forty minutes is forty minutes and you're allowed to find that annoying for about a day. But you didn't write to me annoyed. You wrote to me done, and done is a lot to bring to three sweaters.

And I know what you're going to say because you already said it, the list, you sent a list. Honey, she doesn't want the list. The list turns her into a vending machine. The list means she isn't picking anything, she's just filling an order, and she has been picking things out for you since before you could hold your own head up. She wants to walk out of that store carrying something she chose.

Here's the part I'd like you to sit in for a minute, because I've been sitting in it since I read your letter. One day my girls are going to be standing in somebody's kitchen describing me exactly the way you just described her. Wrong gift. Doesn't listen. Exhausting. And I'll be seventy-one and I'll have driven somewhere in the cold to get it.

So no. Don't tell her to stop. You asked a small question and that's the small answer, and here's why: she is not going to hear “let's simplify.” She's going to hear that she got it wrong enough times that you'd rather she didn't try. That's a big thing to do to somebody over a drive to Chinook.

Take the drive. Put a podcast on. Mine, ideally.

Some year the sweaters stop coming, and that's the year you get your December back.

“I stopped organizing my friends and the friendship ended.”

I booked everything. Dinners, birthdays, the cottage, the group chat, all of it. This year I stopped, just to see. Nothing happened. Two birthdays went by with a text. Then one of the guys asked me why the group is falling apart and said I should start planning again because I'm so good at it. I haven't answered him yet.

Done Being The Group Chat, Halifax

Don't answer him. Let that message sit there until it grows a beard.

“You're so good at it” isn't a compliment, it's a job posting. And look at when it showed up. Not at your birthday. Not at either of the two birthdays that came and went with a text. It showed up the first time one of them wanted something booked. Nobody told you that you were good at it in July.

Now the ugly part, which you already know and are waiting for somebody else to say first. The group didn't fall apart. There was never a group. You were the group. You were the calendar and the reservation and the reminder and the follow-up text and the birthday and the guilt, and when you took all of that out of the room, what was left was five people who like each other in theory and have never once had to prove it.

So don't give a speech. Please. Nobody in the history of the world has ever been argued into caring. Next time somebody says we should all get together soon, you send six words back. “Love that, send me the details.”

Then put the phone face down and go do literally anything else.

Maybe they surprise you. Maybe Brenda books a table and you all end up crying into a bruschetta and it turns out you had real friends buried under twelve years of logistics.

Maybe nobody texts until March.

Either way you'll finally know what you've got, and I'd rather you find out in December than at sixty.

The mail

That's the mail. Three resignations I'd sign, and one woman in Calgary who's going to be annoyed with me until roughly the second Tuesday of January.

Know the difference, though. Some of what's wearing you out is a man who won't lift a box, and you can put that down whenever you like. And some of it is just somebody loving you badly, which is a different problem with a much shorter window on it.

This is Joseph Tito, and I bitch so you don't have to.