Séamas O'Reilly: Managing a family Christmas... with ten siblings!

Séamas O'Reilly. Picture: Orfhlaith Whelan

When I was a child, my entire family used to return to our family home for Christmas. We can’t anymore, of course. There are simply too many of us. 

If you include partners and children — and, sentimental as we are, we do tend to consider those people family — my already large clan of 11 kids and my dad, has now ballooned to 38 people. 

Our rural bungalow family home is roomy enough (it did, after all, house the 12 of us for a good stint) but it is not, sadly, a TARDIS.

When I talk about my big family, I always receive the same few reactions. Actually, this is a lie. 

For reasons well known to those who read this column, in the last few years there has been a new contender which has outpaced all others; the repetition of the words ‘ten siblings’ in an awful approximation of Tommy Bowe’s voice.

But before all that, people did say the same few things: Do you remember all their names? How did you all get around? Your parents mustn’t have had many hobbies, and always, eventually, Jesus, what were Christmases like in your house?

The first three questions, I can dispatch here and now.

Respectively; ‘yes’, ‘in a minibus’, and ‘not really, no’. As for the last query — well, for the day that’s in it, I’m happy to tackle it in some detail.

The Christmases of my early childhood very much fit the pattern you might imagine. 

My parents’ fecundity had distributed their 11 children in fairly even bursts, with all of us arriving within 15 years. 

This meant that we were, at least for a short period, all children at once. As the ninth in line, I was on the younger end, and my earliest Christmases were a mix of being spoiled, and radically ignored, by my older siblings.

I recall one scene very clearly. 

I must have only been five or six, but its memory sticks in my brain like something from a Hieronymus Bosch painting, or that one episode of Father Ted where the evil priests on Rugged Island are spied through a window engaging in all of the vices they claimed to have forsaken for Lent.

We were all, for some implausible reason, gathered in our garage, simultaneously trying out our newly acquired wares. 

Mairead using a yo-yo; Shane trying and failing to solve a Rubik’s cube; Dara wearing his brand new Neville Southall shinpads and bidding us to kick them so he could see if they cut the mustard; Dearbhaile, making a valiant, but futile, effort to use her new skipping rope in whatever space she could muster between the family minibus, a freezer, and her 10 gift-demented siblings. 

In the midst of all this, I see myself, five years old and farming mad, picking my way through this irascible riot of recreation in a tiny little John Deere tractor pedal car, in a jaunty little flat cap Santa had just delivered.

If that sounds like celebrating Christmas at the arrivals gate of Stansted Airport, it’s about right. 

Our Christmas dinners were similarly oversized. In one sense, quite literally. 

On the entirely true — but somewhat fortuitous — grounds that our home oven was not large enough to cook a turkey that would feed us all, the convent attached to our primary school offered their help. 

The nuns were very fond of my father, who had always helped out at the school, and my mother, whose death at such a young age had greatly affected them. 

So, each year, my father and I would deliver the biggest turkey we could get to Sister Angela, a wonderfully burly cook who had a wide smile and even wider forearms.

These would be put to good use the following day, as she heaved from her industrial oven a turkey twice the size of the one we’d provided. 

Even though it was obvious they’d taken our large turkey and swapped it for one the size of Tadhg Furlong, this annual act of benevolent subterfuge was never mentioned or addressed. I swear, one year it came stuffed with an entire ham.

When I was midway through primary school, my siblings had begun leaving Derry. Drip by drip, they were sieved and sorted into adult lives that would be lived far away, an outward trickle of family members which became a constant click track of my adolescence.

While we did appreciate the extra legroom — access to both our bathroom and landline phone improved greatly, year on year — December was always a gladdening time, as our home gradually refilled, and the wholesome, cosy glee of walking in from the cold to find dim lights and a packed house, a twinkling tree, and a dog going slightly mad from overstimulation; to hear singing from the dining room, weeping over Muppet Christmas Carol in the living room, and the screaming, furious invective of a board game session in kitchen.

Over the next 20 years, these returns grew less frequent. 

My dad’s house is always, thankfully, full, it’s just that with so many partners and kids in tow, it only takes a couple of us to come back before maximum occupancy is reached. 

This Christmas, I will be in Dublin with my in-laws, as I have been for the past five years. I’ve grown to love the new joys of their age-old Christmas traditions and feel lucky that I’ve married into a family whose company I treasure as much as my own.

But as much as I love being from a big family, I will not be repeating that particular trick myself. 

My two kids simply won’t know the same joys I did, so it’s my job to give them different, and equal pleasures to those I knew. 

In the meantime, I’ll bore them to tears with stories of the packed house and the constant noise; the nun-cooked turkey, and the doorbell ringing off the hook; and of the garage, the tractor, and the flat-cap that will always mean Christmas to me.