Is an Overcrowded House Such a Terrible Thing?
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It’s almost time for my favorite social-media holiday-season tradition. It comes from the U.K., where every Christmastime, people share pictures of the makeshift spare beds they’re sleeping in while visiting family, with the hashtag #DuvetKnowItsChristmas. To be clear, these are not beds in guest rooms. They are leaky twin-size air mattresses on the kitchen floor and cots jammed into corners of basements and storage rooms. They are beds made out of non-bed materials. The bedding is not matching, and often there’s a cartoon-character element.
The spirit of #DuvetKnowItsChristmas is one of cheerful resignation. People are not complaining so much as acknowledging Britishly that having a houseful of guests over the holiday comes at the cost of sleeping in a real bed. In some cases, someone has ceded their bed to older relatives, which is very gracious. Mostly, the implication is that the whole family has crashed together and all surfaces are fair game.
I love #DuvetKnowItsChristmas, which began in 2011 with a Twitter post by British writer and musician Rhodri Marsden, because it provides us with some rare and precious regular-house representation. This is what the houses that I visit really look like. They are under 2,000 square feet and there is no “coffee station” or prep kitchen behind the real kitchen. The kitchen island is not a vast expanse of custom marble.
I’ve been tracking the death of regular-house representation at the hands of influencers for a while now, but it’s been only in the last couple of years that I’ve felt the shadow of this decline on my actual life. Part of what makes #DuvetKnowItsChristmas feel like home to me is that houses in the U.K. are generally much smaller than in America — the national average is just shy of 1,100 square feet, which is less than half of America’s average.
Like many city dwellers, my house is not big. It’s about 1,400 square feet and I can never remember whether that includes the back balcony. We have three bedrooms — it’s a nice luxury for city living that each of my kids has his own room — and one bathroom. One-bathrooms, in North American homes, are very rare outside of big cities, and they are “virtually nonexistent” in new builds today, according to the National Kitchen and Bath Association. Over the past decade, the average number of bathrooms per person in America has doubled. Today, the average number of bathrooms in an American home is 2.8.
Put another way: Many Americans in the middle and upper classes are no longer required to share bathrooms with other people, let alone sleep on the kitchen floor while visiting. They are forgetting how to cope with all that closeness. As a host with a one-bathroom apartment, albeit in an aspirationally chic and gentrified part of town, this sometimes makes me apologetic — almost embarrassed. Is the expectation that I should be able to offer guests a private suite part of getting older? If so, I need to get used to it, because we don’t plan on moving. Sometimes, my husband and I wonder what we’ll do if we ever become grandparents. How will we host?
A house overfull of holiday visitors is the precise antidote to the ultimate feeling of status-driven deracination: trying to conjure holiday cheer in a huge, characterless Airbnb rented for the purpose of accommodating everyone. I’ve spent several holidays in rentals that could fit the whole family, and no amount of boisterous crowding can fill the coziness void created by a house furnished without a single source of indirect light. There should be a hashtag commemorating the grim challenge of trying to make a festive meal with the absolute bare minimum of kitchen tools and serving vessels — salad served in a stockpot — under the unforgiving glare of LEDs.
I think the underlying reason why #DuvetKnowItsChristmas has such a satisfying resonance for me is that it celebrates tight quarters without turning them into a political statement. Housing is so unaffordable in North America (and in Britain, for that matter) that representations of domestic space of all sizes are becoming politically charged. Small-house representation on social media is often framed as part of what I call stunt budgeting: “How our family of six lives in a Sprinter van on $20,000 a year” or “Here’s our grocery haul as a family of eight living in 500 square feet.” This kind of content is meant to be aspirational, but it’s actually dystopian in the extreme. There are often religious or ideological underpinnings, but in any case, stunt budgeting always tells a story of elaborately pantomimed resilience in the face of brutal economic odds.
This being America, families who show their small spaces to social media without turning them into cheery demonstrations of ingenuity risk having the cops called on them. Last month, a mom who vlogs under the name the Resilient Jenkins went viral on TikTok for showing how she rearranges the living room furniture each night to accommodate bedding for her four kids. As happens with content like this, the audience freaked out for every possible reason. As always, the specter of Child Protective Services loomed. Many worried about the children’s safety. Others accused the parents of exploiting their kids. There was lots of talk about privacy and spatial organization — some people made CAD drawings showing how the apartment could, in fact, be further optimized. But what I mainly discerned from the viral tail following the Resilient Jenkins is that TikTok is not ready to accept the reality of America’s housing crisis.
The lifestyle of the Resilient Jenkins would be familiar to way more people than the viral commentariat may realize. The National Alliance to End Homelessness reported that 57,563 households were houseless in January 2023, and that the number of unhoused people reached a record high since the Great Depression. Vermont, where I own property, has the second-highest per-capita rate of houselessness in the country (New York is No. 1). Earlier this year, a state-run program that was giving unhoused families access to housing in motels rooms expired; it has been reinstated for winter at a reduced capacity. These families are absolutely sharing one big room, and that’s if they’re lucky.
It’s interesting to see how incendiary domestic interiors on social media can be in this climate of extreme precariousness on one end of the economic spectrum. Meanwhile, your favorite momfluencer has no doubt announced her family’s plans to move into their custom-built “forever home,” likely a monstrosity of minimalist ostentation scaled more along the lines of a municipal building than a private residence. But on social media, one thing unites the moms living in their cars with the moms moving into their dream homes: a cheerful commitment to the bit that they’re both ordinary and blessed. Whatever you do, don’t call attention to anything unusual about their situation, lest you be labeled a hater.
Which is why I am so grateful for the self-deprecating Brits of #DuvetKnowItsChristmas. No one is selling you a life hack or a morally freighted lesson in humility. It’s just family life during the holidays and all the mundane accommodation that this entails.
This year, my family is driving 13 hours to stay with my in-laws in a very rural part of Canada. Usually, we’ll all meet halfway at a rental, but this year we’re putting an end to that tradition, maybe for good. I’ll gladly drive farther to use my mother-in-law’s rolling pin for pie dough instead of an empty wine bottle salvaged from the recycling bin, as I’ve done in past years. Princess that I am, I shipped memory-foam bedding ahead of us to guarantee a comfortable spot for myself. But I am looking forward to the feeling of a crowded house.