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Santa Claus is still a woman
There is something particularly stubborn about gender roles at Christmas.
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Participants at the 'Santa Parade' charity gift-giving event in Japan. Santa Claus may be traditionally a male figure but the heavy lifting in Christmas giving is done by women, says the writer.
PHOTO: EPA
Tim Harford
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The first line of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women is “Christmas won’t be Christmas without presents”, while Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1850 short story The Good Fairy is about Christmas presents and, specifically, women trying to help each other figure out how best to navigate the task of choosing them.
It is a mark of your columnist’s slow wits, then, that after 20 years of writing columns about the economics of Christmas, he has only just noticed the connection between Christmas gifts and women.
