Richard Hogan: When you get everything, does that diminish the significance of Christmas?

Passing on the Christmas traditions like 'cluck and collect'

Richard Hogan: Every year we take a trip to a farm to collect the annual Hogan Christmas turkey and apple juice.

IN a wonderful essay called ‘The Ghost of Christmas Past’, Hugh Leonard recalls his childhood experience of Christmas morning. Through the banal act of cleaning boots, the adult Leonard is transported back into the skin of his childhood self. It is a magical story exploring the power of nostalgia and memory. He utilises an allusion to the great French author Marcel Proust’s work, ‘In Search of Times Past’, where the act of dipping a madeleine in tea takes Proust back into his own childhood.

For Leonard, polishing shoes transports him into his childhood kitchen, where before him the scene unravels like a silent movie. His parents are there, younger and frugally preparing for the big day. What is so beautifully illustrated in both stories is the power repetition has on the human psyche. Whenever we do something repeatedly, it becomes tradition and when this happens the power of nostalgia is born.

Every year on December 22, myself, my wife, and three daughters head to a carpark in Lucan. We’re not going for a relaxing break but rather collecting the annual Hogan Christmas turkey and apple juice. My daughter Lizzy has named it ‘cluck and collect’. We have been doing this for eight years and it has become a perennial favourite in the house. Each year, as we move towards Christmas, the kids are quick to remind me to order the apple cider, that’s what they call apple juice (a mistake I made years ago and is now apart of their lexicon; awkward when ordering juice in restaurants), and turkey from the Ballybryan farm in Offaly.

The idea of the farm is magical for them. They are always full of questions about it and where the turkey lives, the kind of life it has, and how they have so many apples to make so much apple cider. 

When we arrive at Lucan the kids spill out of the car, eyes wide, drinking the scene; a van with turkeys hanging for the denizens of the big smoke before them. The owners of the farm warmly greet us while gathering all the apple cider into boxes. It is a family operation. Each year in October I speak with the matriarch of the family, Paula Lalor, and she fills me in on what kind of year it has been for the apples.

When I get off the phone and inform the kids of “another great year”, it’s greeted with screams of joy. I am conscious of Leonard’s story as we head off, car full, Christmas FM blasting out songs, and kids in great spirits for the arrival of Santa in a couple of days time. I think of their adult lives. What will they say about all of these experiences? And I usually end with a sinuous journey through my own experiences as a child of the ’80s. A time free from technology, materialism, and pandemic. I clearly remember many Christmas nights falling asleep thinking I was the furthest point from Christmas. We didn’t get much during the year, not like children today. So, Christmas was a special time. Those 12 months felt like aeons.

It was a time of magic, great movies, and good food. It was the only time of year I saw my grandmother drink sherry. She came to live with us for a few years when she was 74 and ended up staying for 20. It was the only time she really spoke about her love affair with a Cork hurler. I always thought it was funny, that my grandfather wasn’t her great love affair. My young mind couldn’t comprehend how those two things could exist. But she was great fun.

Once when I had been caught taking a Christmas light from the local Douglas Christmas tree, and brought home by members of An Garda Síochána, she pretended to be my mother when she opened the door. The look on the garda’s face! He didn’t know what to say but the fact I was 10 at the time and she was an old-looking 74-year-old woman was written all over his face. A Christmas miracle. “What did you do that for, Boyeen?” That was her name for me. When I explained I wanted to light my bedroom like Christmas, she smiled and gave me a hug.

Seventy years earlier she had been caught by a police officer in Boston picking flowers. Criminality, it seemed, had passed down the generations. My parents never found out until much later when the statute of limitations had passed.

I wonder does Christmas hold the same magic for today’s children as it did for those of Christmas’s past. When you get everything during the year, does that diminish the significance of Christmas? I also wonder am I falling into the old, ‘these kids don’t respect anything’ mindset.

Perhaps every generation thinks the coming one has everything and appreciates nothing. I hope, ages and ages hence, my children look back at this time, and think about the 22nd and collecting the turkey from the Ballybryan farm, and they are filled with nostalgia. I hope.