What women hate most about the holidays

So many things to think about at Christmas. Decorating the house. Cleaning the house. Untangling the lights. Choosing gifts for the people you love. Selecting presents for people you are forced because their signature is on your paycheque to pretend to love — or at least not hate. Visibly, anyway.

Then there’s all that food. Planning it. Buying it. Baking it. Anticipating the sheer unmitigated joy of eating it, thighs be damned. If there's one time of the year to loosen your belt buckle and the hold you have on your wallet, this is the season.

Let the short-lived merriment begin!

Or not. Unfortunately, for some people — people born with two X chromosomes, a love of toy dogs and an affinity for reading Goop — women, in other words, the holidays represent one thing and one thing only...weight gain.

According to a recent article that appeared online in the U.K. version of Marie Claire, most British women “dread” the festive season, anticipating with shame and horror of their sagging post-Christmas silhouettes.

In a study conducted by a London clinic called LoveLite, two-thirds of all the women surveyed had already begun to “hate” the way they imagined their stomachs would look after an orgy of Christmas eating. Presumably, they were visualizing something akin to a large flotation device interfering with their ability to see their feet.

A lesser number of women expressed equal worry about the growth rate of their thighs and hips, fearing that their most problematic anatomical areas would outweigh Richard Simmons by the first week in January.

The clinic reported that dismayingly large numbers of women — and no, their surnames aren't Kardashian — have already scheduled “non-surgical fat reduction” treatments in anticipation of the flab-fest to come — with interventions up 200 percent over last year’s preseason panic and prevention strategies.

No mention of how the XY crowd, by contrast, are reacting to the fear of weight gain over Christmas — best guess? Bring it on. And by buying pants with elastic waists and warming to the nickname Lumpy.