When my son was much younger, I told a good friend that it was sometimes irritating as a single mom to have to share Christmas credit with a fictional magical elf when I was the one up at 4 a.m. trying to build a Hot Wheels track.

My friend, a lifelong bachelor with no kids, was shocked that I questioned putting my pride aside in order to retain the holiday illusion for my little baby boy. I get it — parenting can’t be about your ego. And yet Rudolph and them aren’t trying to figure out where tab B and slot F are. Where is my classic holiday special, you red-nosed reindeer?

“I get overwhelmed by doing all of this. I just wanna tell them, ‘This is Mom! Actually this is me!’” said Marie Munford of Baltimore, the single mother of a 5- and 7-year-old. “But you take the joy of out of Christmas for them. It’s amazing, just decorating the tree and seeing their happiness.”

Make no mistake: Munford is super into this. She makes footprints with baby powder that head down the stairs to the tree, and creates a Christmas countdown calendar for her son. On the morning of the 25th, “he wakes up at 5 a.m. He can’t sleep. He takes a three- or four-hour nap and then he’s like, ‘OK! Is Santa here?’”

I, too, love that feeling of joy in my kid’s eyes when he comes into the living room, the lights all lit and “Die Hard” on the TV, to see the bounty. But even though we’re past the Santa phase, it’s still work to get up, set up and clean up.

What parents — traditionally mothers — endure to keep the holiday magic alive, falls under the auspices of invisible labor, which factors in our lives every day but intensifies at this time of the year.

“It becomes additional labor that women always have to pick up,” said Karsonya Wise Whitehead, an author and professor of communications and African and African American Studies at Loyola University Maryland. “By the time the holiday happens, it’s so exhausting that you’re not making family moments [with] all the running you do.”

Parenthood is a thankless job we signed up for, and there truly is joy in knowing you made your family’s holiday a little more special. You never want to be that jerk that’s waving receipts in your kids’ face. And yet, like Munford said, a little appreciation would be nice.

That’s the theme of “Oh. What. Fun,” a movie released on Amazon Prime earlier this month about an overachieving Christmas mom (Michelle Pfeiffer) who becomes disillusioned by her family’s ungratefulness for her efforts. “Why does Saint Nick get all the credit?” she asks in the trailer. “Moms do all the work.” She gets so fed up after they accidentally leave her behind for a Christmas Eve outing she planned and paid for that she literally runs away while they try to figure out how to create the magic themselves. (Spoiler: They can’t.)

But it’s not just moms putting in the work. Conz Preti, a deputy editor at Business Insider, recently wrote a column about how her husband, a holiday enthusiast before they married and had kids, is the captain of their household magic.

“People are definitely surprised to find out he’s in charge of it all, especially when I tell my mom friends that I can’t relate to their holiday burnout,” she wrote in an email. Preti does the shopping and her husband does the wrapping and the present set-up under the tree. He even filled the stockings for their kids before traveling this year to visit her family in South America.

I kind of felt compelled to tell my kid that Santa existed because I didn’t want him to be the spoilsport who went to day care and broke all the true believers’ hearts. But not everyone focuses on the man with the bag. “We decided early on never to prioritize the myth of Santa,” Wise said of herself and her husband. “My parents were clear early on that gifts were a blessing and this is labor. It’s stressful to create these family moments.”

She said they were not able to focus on financial gifts early in their marriage, so they turned to activities like scavenger hunts. “We said that this was a holiday of love, and focused on creating moments,” Wise said. It was important they passed that on to their kids, too.

“We tried to raise them in such a way that they are cognizant of what the needs are for the family,” Wise said. “You can get a little stressed about it, but you find a way to make sure it all works.”

And the work is worth it.

Wise’s sons, now in their 20s, have left the nest: One is studying in London, the other married in Atlanta. “Now I look back at what I complained about and wish I could have that back,” she said. “The labor is only for a season. You complain in the moment, but then the moment passes. It makes you realize how quickly it all goes.”