This Child-free Employee Refused to Give Her Christmas Off to a Mom With Kids, and Her Own Sister Called Her Selfish

The holiday season at any workplace is basically the Hunger Games but with more tinsel and passive-aggressive emails. There is always a battle for time off, and inevitably, the “Parent Card” gets thrown on the table. It is the ultimate trump card that is supposed to make every child-free person immediately bow down and surrender their vacation days. But one woman on Reddit just refused to play the game, and honestly, we need to talk about the audacity of people who think reproduction entitles them to your personal time.

Our narrator is a 25-year-old woman who has chosen a child-free life. She started a new job three months ago and just passed her probation. Now, this company actually sounds pretty decent because they have a specific policy for new hires. The boss told her there was one gap left for annual leave on Christmas and they had been saving it for her. Apparently, the rule is that any new employee who passes probation gets their first Christmas off. That is a perk. That is a reward. That is hers.

Now, here is where it gets tricky for some people. The narrator admits she doesn’t really care if she works Christmas or not. She doesn’t celebrate it, and she plans to be on her own. But let’s be very clear about something before we move forward. A day off is a day off. It is part of your compensation package. It does not matter if you are spending it opening presents with twelve orphans or staring at a wall in your underwear eating cereal. It is your time.

Two days later, a colleague approached her. You know exactly where this is going. The colleague asked if she would consider switching shifts. The narrator, exercising her right as a human being with boundaries, simply said no. She didn’t offer an excuse. She didn’t apologize. She just said no.

This did not sit well with the colleague. She immediately launched into the “but I have kids” defense, followed by the incredibly intrusive question of asking what the narrator would be doing for Christmas anyway. This is the part that makes my blood boil. The implication is always that if you don’t have children, your time is less valuable. It implies that your “doing nothing” is less important than their “doing something.”

The colleague walked away moody, but the real betrayal came from inside the house. Later that night, the narrator caught up with her sister. Her sister, who used to agree with her on workplace boundaries before she became a mother herself, completely flipped the script. She called the narrator “selfish.”

Her reasoning? Because the narrator is child-free and the coworker has kids, the coworker “needs” it more. She even threw in the fact that the narrator isn’t visiting family this year as proof that she should have just given up the day. This is the “Single Tax” in action. It is the societal expectation that single or child-free people should always pick up the slack, work the holidays, and sacrifice their downtime because they don’t have a “real” family to go home to.

Let’s act like adults here. If a company cannot function without someone sacrificing their holiday, that is a management problem, not a “child-free employee” problem. The boss gave her the day off. It was a policy. It was a gift for passing probation. Why on earth should she hand that bonus over to a stranger just because that stranger chose to procreate?

The sister is wrong. The coworker is entitled. And the narrator is absolutely not the ahole. Your time off is not a communal resource to be distributed based on who has the cutest dependents. It is yours. Enjoy your phone-free, kid-free, work-free Christmas. You earned it.