A Very Biltmore Christmas & A Happy New Quarter of a Century

Stockings in photo read: “NO DRAMA PLEASE” and “NOT MY PROBLEM” upside-down, from left to right.

No surprise here but as most of you know, I have a penchant for luxury… I mean, I am a taurus after all.

So, naturally when I heard about the Biltmore Estate, I couldn’t wait to plan a trip to visit.

After a lot of research, we decided the best time to go was just before christmas because the estate actually originally opened its doors on Christmas Eve.

Now, over a century later, every year, to celebrate their generational wealth, the descendants who run the joint DECK them halls while us common folk come around to ‘Ooo’ and ‘Ahh’ and give them more money. LOL.

Anyway! My son is obsessed with “Christmas” — this is what he says every time he sees the lights dazzling in our neighborhood around sun down, which leads me to tangentially assert there absolutely is no war on Christmas. Since the first lights went up, we’ve been under strict toddler instruction to “Get in the car!” and drive around to show him more and more lights.

Needless to say, while mildly off put by the obvious display of wealth hoarding, we were excited to see what all the hype was about and enjoy the height of the holiday season with our son. We arrived ready to take in the magic and set all our worldly problems aside for a evening of candlelit peace and joy, as advertised.

Then, we got on the trolley that shuttled us around the sprawling, half the size of Asheville sized property.

From the moment I stepped on that shuttle, the driver would not take his eyes off of me.

His gaze felt like an unsuspecting sunbeam redirected through his thick eyeglass lenses, intended to sear me and set me ablaze.

It was as if I was the only person on the trolley. And then the questions began. I answered, each one so not to be impolite, succinctly. I was trying to signal that I didn’t want to answer more personal questions without causing any tension in front of my son. I looked back at the people around me, they could tell I was uncomfortable and they also could see very clearly what he was doing. It was all over their faces. They said nothing. My husband did say something like “What is this, 21 questions?” trying to redirect the attention onto him, but the driver was entirely unaffected and kept going.

Eventually he began to ask, “What do you d—“ but stopped mid sentence when he noticed my husband handing our son over to me in his rear view mirror and then blurted — as if some sort of internal alarm went off, “Oh, we know what you do.”

“How do you know what i do?” I immediately responded.

He caught on to my discomfort (finally) and stumbled a bit. Said he’d “Seen it all,” and rambled on about how there all “all kinds of families,” as if he was saying something progressive when it was anything but.

He continued to ask a million other questions, none of which included his original question because it no longer mattered to him.

I was a mother and only a mother and that’s all that I could possibly be to him.

But he did feel comfortable enough to continue to comment on the little information I gave him, which included multiple geographical locations that make up my life’s journey thus far, to which he said…

“Oh wow, you get around.”

At that point it was almost time to get off the shuttle and take the much awaited tour of the estate.

The sun was going down over the mountains, snow was even beginning to fall, it was picturesque and stunning. And all I could think about was how I had just spent the past 30 minutes being harassed by a trolley driver under the backdrop of quintessential American Patriarchy.

It truly is the most wonderful time of the year.

When we finally got off, I looked back at the woman behind me.

She said, “next time, just sit in the back.”

Somehow this upset me even more. My husband thought she meant sit behind us next time so he doesn’t bother you but I just heard “Sit in the back,” and immediately felt she was blaming me for his behavior.

This is conditioned behavior after 33 years of being a woman in a deeply misogynistic society.

Sadly, women are the greatest tools and harbingers of the patriarchy. Young women serve to uphold the facade and as we age, we unwittingly fall into whatever place is meant to feed the illusion that if you:

a) Just play your role as a wife, mother, homemaker, housekeeper, etc. well — you will be rewarded in the long run.

And if you don’t, well, you’re just:

b) A childless cat lady.

Both of which are far from the truth.

If you chose option A, you will not be rewarded and odds are, the time you spent devoted to your family will never pay off. Stats show your economic and social standing will only go down over time should you choose to be a full time mom and if not, everyone will expect a completely unrealistic standard of achievement personally and professionally from you while simultaneously shaming you for not being a full time mom.

For me, this all happened by accident. When I was growing up, I never intended on marrying. I always thought (or was told, rather) that I would most likely never be able to have biological children naturally, and I loved my career. I was devoted to that.

And then I was diagnosed with endo/adeno. And then I realized how precious my lineage is and how important it is to me to continue it. And then I realized I might not be able to. And then my disease got worse, I stopped being able to work the way I used to, I fell into a deep depression, a global pandemic arrived, I fell out of love, I had multiple surgeries, I fell in love again, I had a baby, and somehow 5 years went by.

Looking back, while I have zero regrets, I feel 100% confident calling this the ‘Chronic Illness to Tradwife Pipeline’ and I don’t think it is talked about enough.

I intend on changing that. Stay tuned.

My point for now is, I didn’t really choose any of this and that is why this experience was so triggering.

And all I really wanted was to have a nice time! I even wore the “no drama” stockings specifically for the occasion! Which, not that it should matter one bit, was not visible to the driver at all whom — for the record — I know nothing about at all. While I felt deeply judged and on display due the way he singled me out, I have no desire to judge him. I took a deep breath and moved on.

In the end, the tour went on.

We stood behind a guy who was on his phone the whole time, arguing loudly with a woman on the other else of the line. We did a second lap so we could hear the choir sing without the overlap. We enjoyed the decorations. The lighting was comforting and soft. We took a couple pictures that turned out horribly but serve a great memory. We didn’t listen to the history of all the rooms because we don’t care. We got back on the shuttle and…

The driver pretended not to remember us. Shocker. So my husband repeated his name back to him to confirm that he had remembered it correctly.

He then immediately said, “Uh oh!” and got visibly nervous.

He knew exactly what he had done and how it was meant to make me feel. He didn’t say anything else the whole way back to the Inn because now that he no longer felt anonymous, he had nothing else to say.

We left in silence.

“Silent Night” now has a whole new meaning to me.

And to be honest, while I’m certainly not pleased with the way this fully grown man-child behaved himself, I’m not wasting a single moment being mad about it because it really got me thinking about how I got here (an ex wellness junkie turned accidental tradwife) in a while new light.

I’m a believer that perspective is always a blessing.

Wishing everyone a magical Holiday Season and a wonderful New Year! Here’s to a hell of a quarter of a century, may the next quarter, as Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote,

“Include women in the sequel.” —Angelica Schuyler

With Love,

P