What the season means to me: Five Irish authors talk about they memories of Christmas past
and : Five authors share their festive memories
LOUISE O’NEILL
If you ask me about the first Christmas that I remember, I think it would be Christmas 1988. I was three, my family and I were still living in my grandparents’ holiday home down in Inchydoney, and Santa had left a play kitchen set under the tree for me.
I insisted on having a pretend picnic that morning, watching in satisfaction as my parents drank imaginary tea from pink plastic cups. (I would bemoan gendered toys that teach little girls that their role in life is to cook and clean but, eh, I still don’t know how to cook or clean.) But when I think of Christmas as a child, I don’t think of that kitchen set or the Baby Born that swiftly followed – perhaps the reason why I still don’t want to have children is because of that constantly weeping, urinating demon – no, it is something entirely different.
I think of turkeys.
But don’t we all think of turkey when it comes to Christmas, Louise?, I hear you ask me. No. You are all thinking of The Turkey, the centrepiece to the entire meal that your poor mother (and yes, it was always the poor mother) slaved over to ensure it was up to her family’s exacting standards. You cannot understand the relevance of turkeys, plural, to Christmas unless you are, like I am, a butcher’s child. I am an extreme case because my maternal grandparents owned the farm where the turkeys were reared.
My sister and I would watch as the tiny, furry chicks were unloaded into the brooder, huddling under the glowing red light that kept them warm. We would accompany my grandmother as she fed them daily, counting them to make sure they were all still alive. We watched as they grew, becoming more ungainly and awkward, any vestiges of their previous cuteness disappearing, like unfortunate child stars hitting adolescence. My sister and I were also there when the turkeys met their necessary fate, something we were oddly dispassionate about given our involvement in their lives thus far.
I’m not sure if this was because a) we spent a lot of time on the farm and were intensely aware of the differentiation between animals as pets and animals as a potential food source, thus knowing enough not to become attached to the latter, or b) we were mini sociopaths. Even though I preferred my dad’s spiced beef, (which uses a recipe that has been in my family since 1914. It wins awards! The cattle is reared in Inchydoney, for god’s sake, how much lower do you want your food miles to be?!) for the month of December, all talk seemed to be about turkeys.
What this customer had ordered, or how that customer needed a bigger turkey than last year because her son’s family were coming home from Australia for the holidays, or how that repeat order would need to be cancelled because of a death. It was strangely intimate, what you would find out as people placed their orders, their names recorded faithfully in a red and black ledger that was kept in a drawer under the cash register for safe keeping.
The run up to the day itself was like preparing for a marathon, with my dad – ever the perfectionist – sometimes leaving the house at 3am on Christmas Eve to make sure that everything was on schedule. I had this sense of his job being an important part of the festivities; not quite up there with Santa, of course, but not too far off it either. People needed their turkeys for Christmas. It was tradition, after all, and Christmas is all about traditions. It was only after the very last customer had picked up the very last turkey, that my father was able to close the shop door.
They would go for a drink, to deBarras maybe, or Con & Maura’s, before we went to midnight mass. He would look exhausted then, his eyes half closing as if he might crawl under the pew and take a nap. But it would be another year over, another job well done, just like his father before him, and his father’s father before him. MJ O Neills Butcher Shop in Clonakilty has been in my family since 1919. Tradition, you see. And on every Christmas Eve, I would take a few minutes to tell my Dad how proud I was of him. He has such an indefatigable work ethic, insisting on keeping our abattoir open all these years so he could stand over the quality of the produce, his insistence on selling local meat that was you know, actually local, for much the same reason.
He always wanted to do his very best at whatever he turned his hand to, turkeys and all.
It’s funny, the older I get, the less I care about presents under the tree. What I want at Christmas now is time – time with my family, time with my godson, time with my boyfriend and my friends, time to catch my breath after another busy year. After so many years of seeing the dinner table as a battleground, of dreading Christmas because of the inevitable struggle with food, I’ve come to realise that Christmas dinner isn’t about having the perfect turkey or about how much or how little food you can consume on the day. It’s about coming together with people you love, and in the breaking of bread, we allow ourselves to acknowledge that another year is gone, celebrating the wins and mourning the losses. I think that was something my father always understood, why he treated his work with those turkeys with such dignity and seriousness. He saw that food could bring us together in a way that few other things can.
CONAL CREEDON
Christmas? A funny time of year is Christmas. It’s enough to put the head spinning and the mind doing somersaults.
It’s a time when friendship is rekindled with a card or trinket – bygones become bygones and those dead and gone are remembered. It’s a time when the pain of loneliness finds comfort in candles and fairy lights and the lonesome sound of Shane McGowan singing of drunken fairytale nights.
The city braces itself. Because as sure as Christ was born two thousand years ago, this town will erupt in a frenzy when the shops open; the rich living like there’s no tomorrow, spending what they haven’t got, and the poor living like there’s no future spending what they’ll never have. Everyone is skint to the ropes with credit cards maxed on presents that will never be unwrapped. All across Christendom, families will gather on Christmas day for an age-old game of generational role-play: Grannies become Mammies, Granddads become Daddies, and Mammies and Daddies become children again. And just like that, the world stops spinning and the earth stands still for just one day.
Christmas comes and Christmas goes, but there’s always the one that stands head and shoulders above all the rest. My personal Yuletide defining memory reaches right back into the last century. It was a long time ago, forty or fifty years ago, or so. I remember it like it was only yesterday. The word on the street was that there was no Santy Claus, and the rumour spread like wildfire. My belief in Santy remained intact but was on shaky ground that particular year.
Every Christmas without fail he came to my house and left presents at the foot of my bed. it all made sense and seemed credible to me. But the seed of doubt had been planted. Christmas Eve, and it was getting late. There I was tucked up in bed listening to Santy on the radio. He was broadcasting live from the North Pole.
He said his sleigh was packed to the gunnels and the reindeer were harnessed and chomping at the bit. The clock was ticking down. And after a final farewell to Mrs Claus he finished up with – Ho! Ho! Ho! This is Father Christmas signing off from the North Pole. I hope you were all good boys and girls this year and you’ll all be sound asleep when I visit your home… And with a, Ho! Ho! Ho! He was on his way. My mind filled with thoughts and sounds and doubts. I drifted to timelessness.
All sense of time is lost in a state of timelessness, but I was snapped back to reality, wide awake and startled by the muffled sound of hooves, the faint tinkling of sleigh bells and the shuffling of footsteps across our flat roof. I went to investigate. The door onto our flat roof creaked open. There before me, the most magical sight I had ever seen. Like a winter wonderland all roofs, chimneypots and church spires right across the city glistened with a dusting of soft white snow, and lined up in pairs, harnessed to a sleigh carrying more toys than Kilgrews Toy shop window were the reindeer. That’s when Santy Claus stood up from behind the sleigh and looked me straight into the eyes – Hoi! What are you doing there, says he.
– I live here, says I.
– Shouldn’t you be tucked up in bed asleep?
There was a moment of hesitation.
– Ah-ha, says he. You’re one of them non-believers.
– I’m a believer, says I. I swear, I’m a believer!
But he must have seen the doubt in my eyes.
– Look, says he. Sit down there for a second ‘til I talk to you... I has enough to be doing on Christmas morning bringing presents to the believers than to be bothered me barney bringin’ lumps a coal to the non-believers. I couldn’t give a monkeys if you believe or you don’t believe. See, it’s as simple as this. There’s two types of people in this world. Them that believes and them that don’t believe. Now, all you gotta do is figure out if you are a believer or a non-believer. I’ll make it easy for you. Think of it this way. The day you stop believing in me, that’s the day I’ll stop believing in you...
– But, I’m a believer!
– Right, says he. Now as you know, all believers should be asleep. So, here’s the deal. I must do one quick delivery to Eddie O’Sullivan over on Washington Street and you’d better be fast asleep by time I get back.
We pushed the sleigh so that it stretched diagonally across the roof making room for the take off. Santy climbed aboard.
– I’ll be back in a half and hour. And I hope you’ll be fast asleep when I do.
– Can I ask ya a question, Santy?
– Fire away, says he.
– How do you manage to get around the world to all the boys and girls in one night?
– Simple, says he. I keep goin’ West! Always keep the settin’ sun in sight. As long as I have the settin’ sun in sight, the dawn of Christmas mornin’ will never creep up behind me. And the aul’ International Date Line comes in handy too, like… They had lightening in their eyes and fire in their breath, as their hooves thundered off across the roof. Up and away the sleigh lifted to the stars, knocking sparks off the gutter as they rose. They circled over head.
– Give something nice to me Aunty Kit and Uncle Jack in Adrigole, I shouted.
– You’re a sound man, Conal boi! he roared. One of our own!
Santy Claus, circled the sleigh one more time, and with a, Ho! Ho! Ho!, they were gone shooting across the Southern sky, Westward.
That was a long time ago ten twenty, thirty years ago or so. But ever since that first and only time I met Santy, I have been a believer. And each year Santy finds his way down into the belly of Cork city and all the way to my house. He doesn’t bring me presents anymore, I’m a bit too big for that. These days he fills the house with a sense of Christmas cheer, peace and good will.
Christmas? A funny time of the year is Christmas. It’s a time when the mind wanders to the past, when everything was happy, sweet and innocent in the world. It’s special time. A time when the myths of childhood become truths, and the magic of belief is restored. And I suppose that’s it, Christmas is a time of belief.
CAROLINE O’DONOGHUE
All of my early Christmases are a blur until Cat Christmas. You don’t forget a thing like Cat Christmas. When I was about eight, I found a stray black tom cat, smuggled it into the garage, and fed it for a period of weeks. Perhaps if it weren’t December, and my parents weren’t struggling with buying presents for four school-aged children plus catering for a dozen people on Christmas Day, they would have noticed that I was suddenly covered in scratches and had contracted ringworm. If they did notice, they didn’t say
anything. We were a profoundly anti-cat household. We were dog all the way through. It’s possible that my parents knew about the cat in the garage, and had decided to break my heart about it in the New Year, when a tantrum was something they could budget time for.
Anyway. On Christmas Day, I slipped away to give the cat some turkey gristle. A few hours later, I checked back in on the cat. Here, I learned some crucial information about cat care, which is that most things give cats diarrhoea. Cats need almost no encouragement to crap themselves endlessly, and I found this out when I stood barefoot in the evidence. Rushing away to clean my legs (there really was a lot of it) I left the garage door open, whereby the cat, sick and crazed with the taste of poultry, escaped into the kitchen and feasted on the remains.
Everyone was still eating, and it was only when my dad went into kitchen for a second helping was he confronted with not one, but three new bits of information. One: there was a cat in his house. Two: the cat had eaten the rest of the turkey. Three: the cat had, through various expulsions through different orifices, destroyed the bird, the sprouts, the spuds, the sides, the dessert, everything.
I don’t remember what came next. I assume there was some kind of punishment when the trail of cat waste inevitably led back to me. But all anyone remembers is that the cat destroyed Christmas lunch, and that by 8pm, when everyone was hungry again, my uncle and cousins were given beans on toast.
Every Christmas, whether we’re together or not, we talk about Cat Christmas. We also talk about Topside of Beef Christmas, when my Dad forgot to pick up the turkey and had to drive to Tipperary on Christmas Eve to raid the freezer of my brother’s girlfriend’s father, only to find a brick of beef that had to be defrosted in the bath overnight and tasted like shoe leather the next morning. We have had a dozen lovely Christmases in our house, but the Christmas we love talking about is the one that followed the great chip pan fire of 1996, where we had to live in a mouldy rental house while the kitchen got fixed.
You’ll find that most Christmases in most families are the same. We forget the Christmases that went according to plan, but we deify the Christmases that went wrong. I think it’s a relief, really. At some point between December 20th and 25th, we all lose our minds in the pursuit of holly-jolly perfection. We want to be as rich as the family in Home Alone; as beautiful as Donna Reed in It’s A Wonderful Life, as grateful as Tiny Tim from A Christmas Carol. We want to be pure beings of charitable, comfortable, thoughtful festive light, while simultaneously spending €65 we don’t have on a Jo Malone candle for the downstairs bathroom. We want to be Scrooge McDuck and Kermit the Frog at the same time.
Which is why, I think, we’re a bit relieved when Christmas goes terribly wrong. Christmas going wrong is like a celebrity falling in heels, or an old lady farting, or a dog in a school playground. It turns the whole occasion on its head. It explodes the expectation of how you’re supposed to act and reminds you that the world, whether it’s Christmas or not, is pure chaos magic. In recent years, Christmas has gone wrong in different ways. Sometimes in darker ways. People have been sick; people have been separated; deep, year-round problems that we prayed would stay dormant for December 25th rear their heads just in time to ruin the day entirely. There have been tears on Christmas day, tears that grew more intense because no one wants to be the person who cries on Christmas. No one wants to be the person who ruins it for everyone else. If this year, you become the person who has to inadvertently ruin Christmas, please take this information with you: in ten years, you are the thing everyone will remember best.
PATRICIA SCANLON
I love and loathe Christmas in equal measure. Any mention of the C word before December brings me out in a rash. Seeing decorations in November makes my head spin. And this year, when I walked into a shop three days before Halloween and heard Slade’s Merry Christmas Everyone I immediately turned around and walked out as my inner Grinch was unleashed. I swore never to darken its doors again.
I probably will, though, as they do lovely gift sets and as soon as the calendar reaches December 21st, I’m in full blown festive mood, ready to get my yuletide spirit on and quite happy to hum White Christmas while wandering around the glittery shops.
It is, after all, the shortest day of the year and I need lights, sparkles and optimism to get me through the bleakness of mid-winter.
I am not, it has to be said, a fan of short days and long nights. I need Christmas to lighten up what would otherwise be the gloomiest month of the year.
But in deciding what Christmas means to me, I also have to decide what it does not. Despite the relentless pressure, my Christmas is most definitely not about a home that’s decorated on trend, a perfectly dressed table and either giving or receiving presents that are outrageous in their cost. Even less is it about stressing over one meal on one day. Of course I want things to be as nice as possible, but in the end I truly feel grateful that I’m lucky enough to have a warm home and food on the table. Christmas is a time for being thankful, not perfect.
In reality, my Christmas is about embracing the warmth of being indoors, of hibernating for a few days and recharging my batteries before facing a New Year that will bring the same old challenges but - in my post-Christmas glow - with a renewed optimism.
It’s also a way of reflecting on the past and remembering the friends and family who are no longer with us. When I get up on Christmas morning I put on my playlist of traditional carols and take those memories out of the box at the back of my mind to hold them up against the light again.
They include, as all Christmas memories must, the ones of childhood when our Christmas timetable was totally dislocated from every other child’s because my parents owned a small grocery store, and Christmas began, not with our letters to Santa, but with my dad talking about the wholesale prices of festive tins of biscuits and selection boxes.
They include earning pocket money by making Christmas crackers from a consignment of tiny toys and games that he’d bought at a knock-down price one year - that consignment covered at least three Christmases as well as some lucky dip bags each following Easter.
And my memories also include watching my grandmother make puddings for everyone in the family, boiling them in cloth and hanging them over the gas cooker with meat hooks so that they dried out. Even the words ‘Christmas pudding’ still conjure up for me the aroma of cooked fruit mixed with the laundry smell of wet fabric. Also included in my Christmas memories are our family evenings in the ‘good’ room, a place that for the rest of the year was reserved for visitors but that at Christmas was the location of the tree and the boxes of Lemons sweets that we were allowed to pick from ANY TIME during the day.
There are more recent memories too - of a Christmas spent in Egypt where the staff of a local hotel put on an enthusiastic version of Jesus Christ, Superstar even though none of the cast was Christian. And another Christmas in the Caribbean where an impromptu choir of local people joined together to sing a joyful Feliz Navidad in a tiny beach front shop. People are politer, kinder and more thoughtful at Christmas - at least until late evening shopping on Christmas Eve where things can get a bit fraught. But afterwards, when everything that can be bought has been bought and there’s a sudden communal exhalation that there’s nothing more to do, it’s perfect.
I loathe the commercialisation of Christmas, but it has always been commercialised. Possibly what I dislike more is the pressure to be seen to be having a good time, even when you’re not ready for it. In the end, when you ask most people how their Christmas Day was, their reply is ‘quiet’. Which is what means the most to me. A quiet time. With family if that works. Alone if that’s better. But a time to breathe in a world that wants us to be moving at full pace every other day of the year.
BILLY O’CALLAGHAN
The Holly Bough always heralded Christmas into our house. My mother would come in from Joe Donovan’s shop in the village with the Echo under her arm, and folded into it, the Holly Bough. It was a surprise that I chose to fall for, year after year from the age of about seven or eight, even though I knew well enough by the second or third time what was waiting for me when she’d drop the papers down on the table, go through into the kitchen to start unpacking the few messages she’d bought, and call out to me from over her shoulder to check the deaths, because she’d heard that Mr. or Mrs. so-and-so wasn’t a bit well. I’d pick up the Echo
and in the process uncover the hidden gem, and that was it.
Half of Douglas could have fallen down dead for all I cared then, because I had tinsel in my sights and warmth in my heart. Christmas today feels far removed from the Christmases of my childhood. Certainly more hectic and with so much more emphasis on material things, it seems defined now by the outright panic of shopping, the crowds, the expense, and the ridiculous need to have to find and buy the perfect gift for the person who probably already has everything anyway – everything that carries a price tag, at least. And if several weeks’ worth of the hustle and bustle doesn’t wear you to a frazzle then the parties will do the trick. Christmas these days is a synonym for excess, but that’s all part of the “holiday” now, and to resist the tide is to open yourself to accusations of the most foul and wicked Scroogery.
Just listening to the stories of Christmas that the older generations have to tell (my father recalls getting a black cat one year that vanished after a few days, only to reappear as his present again the following year!) should be assurance enough that we’ve never had it so good. But in spoiling ourselves rotten, we’ve surely lost some of what really matters. The whole thing now has become such a gruelling marathon that when the Day itself finally arrives it feels less like a celebration than a ceasefire.
Though I am as given as the next overweight, middle-aged man to a pleasing spot of gluttony, parties hold no great appeal for me. Tending as I do towards introversion, I like my life kept to a slower pace and lower decibel. But even so, it’s hard not to be at least somewhat drawn in to the frenzy of Christmas.
This is all in stark contrast to what I remember of years’ past. Decking the house was a big deal to us, and my father, all of a sudden the biggest child in our family, would spend what seemed like hours trying to make the tacky decorations hang from the ceiling in a way that mostly hid their tears and breaks, and smothering the plastic tree in strings of balding tinsel, beardless – or, worse still, headless – Santas, and robins that had lost one or both of their wings. Only half the lights ever worked, and it seemed that, every second year, a new set would be bought, not to replace what was already on there but in addition to them. Finally, I’d cut up a Corn Flakes box into the shape that, in my mind if nowhere else in the universe, passed as a star, and wrap it in tin foil and Sellotape as the crowning glory.
That tree’s colourful glow remains vivid in my mind. Presents have always mattered to children, of course, but even the toys we thought we had to have in order to consider our lives complete were still just things, lumps of iron or plastic.
If I close my eyes, it’s not the toys I remember, but sitting before that tree in the otherwise-dark while old music played, soft carols that carried some of the same stillness as silence, and my twelve- or twenty-legged cardboard-and-tinfoil star gleamed and glistened high above. But it’s the sense of the other people in the room, some still here, some now gone, and all the surrounding love, that has made magic of that moment.
I published my first short story in the Holly Bough in 1999, and felt as if I’d scaled Everest. I went on to publish a lot, in countries all around the world, stories, articles, even books, and I’ve been back in the
Holly Bough
probably six or eight times since, but no high has ever matched seeing that first story in print, with my name attached, in the paper I’d for so long treasured. Even now, all the Christmases of my life feel pressed like scraps within its hallowed pages, and the mere sight of it on the street or in a shop is enough to fill me again with the spirit of the season.
CONNECT WITH US TODAY
Be the first to know the latest news and updates
