Perhaps It’s Time to Call in the Elves

Amaryllis Knight and Tim Walcott love the holidays. They love the lights and boughs around the house, the thoughtful gifts and chatty cards for friends and relatives, the parties and dinners. The problem is, they just don’t have time to do any of it themselves.

An entrepreneur, she typically wakes up to the sound of faxes coming into her home office. He comes home exhausted from days as a sales director. So this year, the Sherman Oaks couple has hired someone else to do it for them. For $25 an hour, a personal helping service will buy, wrap and send most of their presents, sign and mail out 350 cards, decorate the tree in their house and cater a party for 80 friends and a sit-down Christmas dinner for 15 relatives.

“My mother would be horrified,” admits Knight, 21, a native of London. “She did it all herself. I’d love to. But this is a different place, and I’m living a different life than she was at that time.”

The holidays have changed. As modern home life adjusts to working women, an uneven economy, a relaxation-averse culture, split, blended and remixed families, and relatives scattered around the globe, the holiday rituals that many remember with wistful longing are now being delegated, diluted or, in some cases, dropped altogether.

Gone is the Christmas Day that began with tangerines in your slippers and lasted an entire day with the family. Here, for now, is a season as time-shredded and commercial as the rest of the year--only more so. Personal shoppers are hired to research what friends and family want. Handymen cut down trees and deliver them. Christmas cards gather dust unsent.

Some people are unsure whether they will even give out gifts or have a special meal. Sue Berry of West Covina recalls childhood Christmases full of people and extravagant presents. But this year, the single mother says she and her sister are thinking that, if they have Christmas dinner at all, it might just be a burger barbecue. “We don’t have the time,” says Berry, who holds two jobs. “And we’re tired.”

More than a lack of spare time, it’s an “increasing sense of the necessary” that’s partly behind the shifting practices, according to time researcher Geoffrey Godbey, professor of leisure studies at Pennsylvania State University.

Another reason is the rising number of people living alone or without children. Instead of a big family gathering, he says, “You may have dinner with friends and take over some presents.” A divorced father of grown children, Godbey plans to play squash with the guys on Christmas.

But the most obvious reason the holidays are changing, historians say, is that stay-at-home women have stopped producing them.

Christmas rituals of gift buying and feast making were instituted by women in the Victorian era, when men’s and women’s work became sharply divided, and have been perpetuated by middle-class homemakers ever since. Now that women are in the paid labor force almost as much as men, it’s hard to find anyone to do laundry, dishes and child care, much less homemade mincemeat.

Researchers suspect that at holiday time, as during the rest of the year, men have not picked up domestic duties to the same degree that women have been dropping them. “Women are working an awful lot, and it’s not just the double shift,” says USC sociologist Judith Stacey. “Women’s work typically doesn’t pay as much as men. Women are disproportionately likely to have custody in single-parent homes, to retain custody in remarriages. It means now women are doing much more of all the work and are not available to do the volunteer kinds of things, or in case of holidays these labor-intensive nurturing or family-building activities.”

Barbara Kaye, owner of Executive Runaround in Los Angeles, which specializes in “anything busy people can’t do,” says that in the past five years, her client list has become almost exclusively women who still want to do it all. Even married working mothers of small children have hired her to buy gifts for their husbands’ families.

Paradoxically, the less anyone’s at home, the more important homey holidays have become as an ideal.

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While everyone has gone to work, the winter holiday has swelled into a three-month HallowThanksHanuKwanzaaMas presided over by Martha Stewart and a cottage industry of cooks, decorators, shoppers and handymen.

“We no longer marvel at the fact that a person would call us and say, ‘Hey I’m really busy, and I want a 9-foot perfectly round flawless tree. Please go and pick it out for me, make arrangements for payment and delivery,’ ” said Charles Peltzer, who owns eight Christmas tree farms in Orange County. “We ask them certain questions, like: Is your tree going to be in the center of the room? And they’ll answer yes or no. If yes, we know we have to provide them with a flawless tree all the way around.”

Knowing that people today typically don’t think of what to eat for dinner until about 4 p.m., Stouffer’s has expanded its “meal solution” offerings to company-sized frozen side dishes for the holidays, including whipped sweet potatoes and green bean mushroom casserole with French-fried onions. The usual orange container comes decorated with a snowy holiday scene.

Increasingly, such dishes accompany a mail-order turkey.

Women today still like to be in charge of the holidays, they just don’t feel they have to do it on their mother’s or grandmother’s terms, says Judsen Culbreth, editor in chief of Working Mother magazine in New York. “Our readers seem to say, ‘If I think about it, purchase it, bring it home and set it up, that counts.’ ” She says she’s doing her shopping this year on the Web.

Many women come to that point after frustrating attempts to do it all the old-fashioned way.

Knight said she hired the Concierge shopping service after spending days looking for an Old MacDonald Ernie toy for her nephew in London. “It’s his favorite song. I had to get him this. I went to two Toys R Uses and three smaller toy stores,” she said. Even if she found a parking space, she said they either didn’t have it or couldn’t send it to London. Her personal shopper found it in a day.

Another shopping service, Mixed Bag in Redondo Beach, actually researches gift recipients for clients. Catering mostly to the movie and television industry, owner Cathy Stoia says she does all Tom Hanks’ shopping, even for his wife, Rita Wilson. Last Christmas, she said, “He wanted something different. I had to find out the one thing she loved but never really got.” After asking friends, Stoia came up with a $300 basket full of vintage Romeo and Juliet items.

For research or shopping, Stoia charges $50 an hour. She once bought handmade silk underwear for “a producer at Disney” to give to Mira Sorvino.

A countermovement to simplify the holidays got underway in the ‘80s but hasn’t gained much ground. “We find that people are spending more, doing more and worrying more about it too,” says Chuck Langham, an editor who founded the Society to Curtail Ridiculous and Ostentatious Gift Exchanges (SCROOGE) 18 years ago in Charlottsville, Va. After exchanging one too many golden aardvark ties, Langham organized a group of friends who vowed to cut back their spending. Now his organization sends out a newsletter to 2,100 members encouraging them to replace frantic shopping with activities such as games or vacations.

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Some people like Susan Wald of Santa Monica have intentionally scaled back and changed their focus. Instead of buying presents for two dozen friends, she and her husband now give about $250 to charity and send their friends a letter saying a donation has been given in their name. She says at least 10 friends are now doing the same.

Langham said some people cut back during hard times, but after the stock market boom in the late ‘80s, most people went back to their old habits. “It just goes with the ‘90s,” he says. “Rush rush rush. Spend spend spend. Buy buy buy. Everything has to be done right away and has to be absolutely perfect.”

Part of the problem with modern holidays is that people no longer know what to do if they’re not working or shopping, says University of Iowa labor historian Benjamin Hunnicutt. “The holidays have fallen victim to the malaise of our society, which is overwork. Work has become our religion.”

Hunnicutt, 54, recalls his childhood holidays in the South, when he listened to his uncle tell stories about farm life for hours. Family members made gifts for each other. He regrets that now when he buys computer games for the young children in his family, they tend to play with them all alone.

Others, arguing that change is the only constant, observe that every generation since the Victorians has complained that the holidays are losing their meaning.

Rather than ruining this time of year, some say the fact that people will do whatever it takes to perpetuate holiday rituals is a positive sign that they still have meaning and power to bring people together despite the drastic changes in modern life.

Amaryllis Knight insists hyperefficiency will only make the holidays more enjoyable. And besides, she says, not everything has changed. “Myself and my boyfriend have a funny obsession,” she says. “We have to choose the tree ourselves.”