Sorry for mentioning Christmas in July but as my mother always tells me, it’ll roll around quickly, so now is the perfect time to start looking ahead. It also inevitability means that if you’re a woman, you need to plan out all the domestic tasks, from meal preparation to decoration making, you will have to complete for the perfect holiday season.
In Week one Katie and I discovered it was national Leon Day on the 25thJune (that’s Noel backwards) marking only six months to go until the big day. To find some good imagery for the below tweet we started to browse the Christmas editions of Jackie. When continuing to catalogue the domestic content of the 1970s, I noticed a real increase in entries during the December issues. Before December the domestic holdings have on average two entries often both from the same Patchwork/Look Out feature, of a recipe, and a sewing or crafting idea.
Bossard and Boll state that Christmas symbolises the enactment of rituals inside the home which is evident within the December issues of Jackie and Jackie and Diana (Cited in Vachani and Pullen, 2011, p.808). Cataloguing the Christmas issues revealed an increase in domestic-themed features to around six entries per edition focusing on crafting, hand-made gift making, gift giving to ensure quality domestic relationships, recipes and hosting within the home.
Furthermore, the holiday season also has the societal pressures to nurture relationships with family and friends through gift-giving and hosting them within the domestic environment (Vachini and Pullen, 2011, p.808). We can understand Christmas as a performance of gendered ideology including food and gift-giving and Jackie encouraged this performance through increased domesticity during the Christmas period seemingly for the benefit of others, providing feelings of selflessness to the reader’s and instilling habits into them to carry into adulthood and eventually, their own homes.
Patchwork on the 6thof December 1975 encapsulates this notion with five craft ideas to be used as gifts as well as an advert for Oxfam charity Christmas cards. The only none do-it-yourself idea is to give back to charity, still implanting a caring attribute to the act of card giving. We are told that there are only “twenty-one shopping days to Christmas and you’ve begun to wish you hadn’t spent that money […] all on yourself” even though as a publication Jackie encouraged its readers to do just that. There are then five ideas of crafts that can be given as presents using items readily available in the home from string to tissues boxes.
Christmas, as a gift-giving holiday as opposed to a Christian celebration is a capitalist commodity which encourages consumerism. Two of the ideas (Press Out Presents and A Purrfect Pressie) before being crafted require the purchase of branded items. Jackie and Diana offer the best of both worlds, allowing its readers to indulge in the consumerist aspect of Christmas whilst remaining true to their domestic roots and using the consumption to nurture domestic relationships through gifts (the saying You Can’t Buy Love springs to mind here).
This contradiction between consumerism and do-it-yourself is continued in this All Tied Up feature. You can buy gifts but don’t want to spoil them with lacklustre wrapping. Crafting was encouraged as a fun activity for girls, blurring the boundaries between leisure time and the unpaid labour of women to make Christmas perfect (Vachini and Pullen, 2011, p.809). Jackie encouraged girls to be organised enough to extravagantly wrap presents using skills honed in the domestic environment but disguised it as a fun and creative past-time through bold and colourful illustrations and the empowering decision of which option to create.
(Jackie and Diana, 18thDecember 1976)
However, women cannot be seen to indulge too much during the Christmas period. A continued narrative of Jackie is to consume, but not too much, you are wanting to be “satisfied but not stuffed”. Jackie embodies a normative femininity, especially in regards to weight and dieting. As this recipe shows, the ritual of losing excess weight gain over the Christmas period is encouraged in the typical woman’s magazine narrative of a new year, new you (this is then replaced with getting your beach body around March time). Cooking is a ritual to be enjoyed and shared with your family and friends but the food itself is not, it is simply an aid to achieving the “ideal” slim and healthy feminine body.
(Jackie and Diana, 1stJanuary 1977)
Personally, I love Christmas and a Christmas craft (Pinterest is my haven) so maybe I am being a little harsh. However, the increase in domestic content cannot be ignored and it is clear that Christmas was a time for girls to show off their domestic skills, but always for the benefit of others.
By Rosie Steele.
References
Vachhani, S.J. and Pullen, A. (2011) ‘Home is where the heart is? Organising women’s work and domesticity at Christmas’, Organization[online], 18(6), pp. 807–821. DOI: 10.1177/1350508411416404.
LJMU Special Collections & Archives 