Last weekend’s episode of Saturday Night Live might (and should) make you want to revisit your Christmas shopping list. Actually, maybe scrap it altogether and make a new one. Your mom probably deserves a lot better.
In a sketch from SNL’s December 19 episode, host Kristen Wiig is an overworked, under-appreciated matriarch woken up on Christmas morning by her overeager kids (Chloe Fineman and Kyle Mooney). They start ripping open an endless stream of gifts: rollerblades, candy, a Nerf gun. Wiig’s husband, played by Beck Bennett, excitedly shows off his new vintage pinball machine and a signed baseball bat. Then we see her gift: a robe. Just, a robe. And one that was on sale, at that.
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As the family continues to unveil their new presents, Wiig only gets more and more disgruntled. “I burned my arm in the oven,” she says at one point, singing along to the cursed Christmas song. “It hurt pretty bad but I didn’t even scream, because I keep the pain inside of me.” Tensions rise when the family dog (played by Fineman’s Shiba Inu, Peach), is also gifted a miniature, puppy-sized robe -- and more presents, too. The scene ends with Wiig, exhausted and clothed in her new robe, drinking wine on the couch. It’s presumably still no later than 10 a.m.
SNL’s sketches vary from the absurd to the all too familiar, and this one definitely hit many viewers close to home. (Even though the sketch fails to address the fact that it’s also notoriously impossible to shop for dads.) One Twitter user joked about throwing out the robe they’d already purchased for their mom this year.
“Funny but I wanna cry. I felt that, as a mom. Sigh,” one parent wrote in a YouTube comment. Another suggested that her fellow moms pick up her holiday tradition and buy gifts for themselves.
But Kenan Thompson says it best in a voice-over: “Your mom does everything for your family. Get her more than one present. Moms like stuff, too.” With a few days left until Christmas, think about what your mother might really like beyond loungewear that was 40% off — or at least splurge for a nice bottle of wine for her drink in the robe.