Christmas wouldn't exist if it weren't for womankind. It's modern women's keenness to pressurise ourselves into exhausting over-achievement that make possible the festive season as we know it.
Perfect gifts, imaginative wrapping, tasteful trees, beautiful decorations, impeccable food, happy families, a glamorous outfit and thoughtfully annotated Christmas cards are just a few of the goals women set out to achieve.
Few men are stressing about whether they can find a Nordmann fir that's the right shape for their bay window, while manically clipping stuffing recipes from newspapers and making interminable lists of presents.
Christmas, with its emphasis on consumerism and domesticity, brings out the worst of the self-induced competitiveness that is a woman's permanent condition.
In Natasha Walters's forthcoming book Living Doll, an exploration of sexism today, she writes that 'home is the centre of a life well lived.
Yet the insistence that this haven must be created and protected by women because of our unique aptitudes rests on a shaky assumption'.
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