Holiday Mental Load: Why The Autumn Pile Up Lands On You

The holiday mental load starts in October. Costumes, Thanksgiving lists and Sinterklaas poems all run through one brain. Here is how to put some down.

Last updated: 29 October 2026

It starts with a costume. Somewhere in the first week of October a small person announces she wants to be “a bat, but a nice one, that glows,” and a little tab opens in your head that will not close until December. 🫠

Then the tabs multiply. Halloween costumes, the Thanksgiving list, who is hosting, who is not speaking to whom, and here in the Netherlands, the Sinterklaas poems, the shoe by the door and the pepernoten nobody else remembered to buy.

The holiday mental load is the invisible thinking, remembering and planning that turns autumn into one long project, and it almost always runs through one brain. Mothers handle 71 percent of household mental labour tasks, according to a 2024 University of Bath study of 3,000 US parents. By November, that brain is cooked.

So pull up a chair. I want to show you what the autumn pile up actually looks like, why it lands on you, what the research says, and how to start putting pieces of it down before December eats you alive. Coffee first. 💛

What is the holiday mental load, exactly?

The holiday mental load is all the unpaid thinking work behind a celebration: noticing what needs to happen, planning it, remembering it and checking that it actually happened. The cooking and the wrapping are the visible part. The thinking is the part nobody sees, because it happens in your head at 11 at night.

Sociologist Allison Daminger gave this a proper name in her 2019 study “The Cognitive Dimension of Household Labor” in the American Sociological Review: cognitive labour. Based on interviews with 35 couples, she described four parts of it: anticipating needs, identifying options, making decisions and monitoring progress.

Here is the bit that made me laugh out loud, and then not laugh at all. Daminger found women do more of the anticipating and the monitoring, while decisions are shared roughly equally. So yes, he gets a vote on the costume. You are the one who remembered there needed to be a costume. 😅

That monitoring part never really switches off either, which is why the worrying counts as mental load too.

Why does the autumn pile up feel heavier than one holiday?

The autumn pile up feels heavier because the holidays do not take turns. Halloween, Thanksgiving, Sinterklaas and Christmas all overlap, so the planning for the next one starts before the last one is cleaned up. There is no gap where your brain gets to clock off.

Sinterklaas is my lived reality. He arrives by boat in the middle of November, the kids put their shoe by the door with a carrot for his horse, and on 5 December everyone gets presents with a homemade poem, sometimes wrapped inside a “surprise,” a crafted disguise that turns a pair of socks into a papier mache cheese.

Those poems do not write themselves. Neither does the list of who drew whose name, or the reminder to buy chocolate letters before the shop runs out of the right initials.

Every holiday adds its own list, and every list lands in the same head. If you live in the US, swap my poems for a Halloween costume, a class party sign up sheet and a Thanksgiving seating plan. Same brain. Same Tuesday.

What does the holiday mental load actually look like on paper?

The holiday mental load looks tiny when you say one item out loud and enormous when you write it all down. That is exactly why nobody else sees it. Here is what an autumn list looks like when you combine my Dutch one with the American version my readers live with:

• Ask what she wants to be for Halloween, then ask again in four days because the answer has changed
• Check whether last year’s costume still fits, and remember where you put it
• Buy treats early enough to get the good ones, but late enough that they do not get eaten
• Answer the class group chat about who brings what to the autumn party
• Plan the Thanksgiving menu, the guest list and the seating around two relatives who do not talk
• Draw names for Sinterklaas and remind every adult of their name, twice
• Write the poems, or nudge the other adults to write theirs
• Buy chocolate letters, pepernoten and a carrot for the shoe
• Remember who wanted which present and hide it somewhere better than last year
• Keep the calendar straight for every school event, birthday and visit

None of this is hard on its own. All of it together is a part time job nobody hired you for. Writing it down is the first step to sharing it, because nobody can pick up a list they cannot see.

Why do costumes and treats make the holiday mental load worse?

Costumes and treats make the holiday mental load heavier because they come with an audience. A to do list is tiring. A to do list that other moms will judge at the school gate is exhausting.

I know this one from the inside. There is a mom at our school who is at every meeting, bakes pancakes from scratch and brings handmade Easter treats.

I arrived with supermarket eggs. The children were fine. I was not fine.

The kids never noticed the difference, but my brain quietly added a new invisible job: compare, judge, do better next time. I wrote more about that feeling in the post about how the mom with the homemade Easter treats is really your mirror, not your competition.

Halloween costumes do the exact same thing, just with more glitter. Shop bought counts. Last year’s counts. A bedsheet with two eye holes counts, and honestly it is a classic for a reason. ✨

Why does the holiday planning always land on one person?

The holiday planning lands on one person because whoever noticed first becomes the person who is expected to notice every time. Nobody decides it out loud. It just becomes the system, and then the system becomes you, which is how you end up as the default parent without anyone holding a vote.

My clearest example is not even a holiday. Our Dutch garbage app sends a notification the night before collection, and for years I was the one who saw it, processed it and told my boyfriend which bin to take out.

One evening I completely fell apart over it, and it was never about the bin. I told that whole story in the garbage app post, so I will keep it short here.

It was about every invisible yes I had been absorbing for years without anyone noticing. Autumn is that garbage notification times fifty. Every costume, poem and side dish is another tiny yes, and they all pile up in the same body.

Is the holiday mental load really worse for moms?

Yes, the research says mothers carry most of the mental load, and the holidays make it louder. In the 2024 University of Bath study published in the Journal of Marriage and Family, mothers handled 71 percent of household mental labour tasks, compared with 45 percent for fathers. For daily jobs like childcare, the gap was 79 percent to 37 percent.

The Pew Research Center found the same pattern in a 2022 survey: 78 percent of partnered mothers with kids under 18 said they do more than their partner when it comes to managing their children’s schedules and activities. The holiday season is basically one giant schedule.

And the stress follows. In a 2006 American Psychological Association holiday survey, 44 percent of women reported more stress during the holidays, compared with 31 percent of men, and 69 percent of women named lack of time as a cause.

Twenty years later, you could run that survey at my kitchen table and get the same answer. If the numbers hit home, I dig into them further in why you are carrying 71 percent of the mental load and nobody even notices.

How do you share the holiday mental load without becoming the manager?

You share the holiday mental load by handing over whole jobs, including the noticing and the remembering, not just the errand at the end. “Can you buy the pepernoten?” is still your job with the shopping delegated. “Sinterklaas is yours this year, start to finish” is a real handover.

Here is how I do it now, in three moves:

1. Cut. Look at the full autumn list and cross off anything that only exists to impress someone. The handmade treats. The themed table. The second costume.
2. See. Get the rest out of your head and somewhere other people can see it, like a shared Google Calendar or a list on the fridge.
3. Unload. Hand over whole holidays or whole categories, then let the other person do it their way. Yes, even if their poem rhymes “shoe” with “shoe.”

I made a free Cut, See, Unload Kit for exactly this, so you can do it with a pen and a cup of tea instead of at midnight in your head.

The point is not a perfect system. The point is that the list stops living only in you.

What do you say to your partner before November hits?

The best time to talk about the holiday mental load is before the holidays start, not on 4 December with a glue gun in your hand. Pick a calm evening, bring the written list and ask to split it by holiday or by category instead of by task.

Something like: “I have been carrying all of autumn in my head and I cannot do it that way this year. Can you take Halloween, completely, including remembering it?” Keep it short, and keep it about the load, not about his character.

You are not asking for help. You are asking for a second owner. If you need words for the harder version of that talk, the conversation to have with your partner when you cannot carry it alone anymore walks you through it.

And if leaving the house for one evening already means writing a three page instruction manual, that is your sign the load is too big for one head.

FAQ

You were never meant to be the whole calendar

The holiday mental load is real, it is measurable, and it lands mostly on moms because nobody ever moved it. Writing it down, cutting what is only there to impress, and handing over whole holidays is how it finally gets lighter.

You do not have to make it magical. You do not have to make the costume from scratch or write every poem in the house.

If you want somewhere to start this week, grab the free Cut, See, Unload Kit and empty your autumn onto paper before it empties you. 🌙

The bat costume will get made. It just does not have to live in your head until December.

Written by

Wendy Venema

A late-realized AuDHD mom in a blended family of seven. I write the posts I needed when I was crying on the bathroom floor.

Read my story