Fifty years of Folens: The making of a Christmas tradition
Rory Hickey's father, principal of Moyderwell Primary School Tralee shared photos of his son enjoying the annuals with Folens as a thank you.
Christmas wouldn't be complete without the most exciting delivery of the school year, the arrival of the Folens Christmas annuals. Súgradh, Spraoi, Siamsa, and Sonas have been gracing our classrooms for 50 years now, providing endless entertainment for children and quiet moments for grateful parents every December.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the educational books, which are filled with new and exciting puzzles, stories, and activities every year. To celebrate, we chatted to the editor of the annuals, Lynn Fitzpatrick, about what goes into the making of the Christmas traditions.
“I remember getting the annuals in school growing up and it was such a highlight of the year. I never dreamt one day I'd be helping to create them,” says Lynn, who has been editing the annuals for the past four years. “When I took them over I went back through every article I could find because I wanted to make sure I understood them. Even though they are modernised it’s still important to be true to them, for the sake of nostalgia and because they’re a huge legacy for the company.”
Lynn is a freelance instructional designer and has worked with Folens for 10 years now, five of which she spent employed by the company on their educational technology team. In fact, they were the first to hire her after she finished her masters in eLearning in 2010. Four years later, she found herself in print and was soon heading the annuals.
“They were always going on in the background while I worked at Folens but I was never actually involved with them,” she explains. “I was in the office in 2016 to work on other projects and they just asked me to have a look at the annuals and now I've been editing them for four years. It’s fabulous.” Lynn says that there was a lot of pressure involved with taking over the running of such a nostalgic part of Irish school life. So, she did her homework and quickly got to work.
“The first thing I did was go into the library in Folens and pull out as many old ones as I could find and I went through every one of them. I tried to identify what I thought were the best puzzles and the best features to kind of get a feel for them,” she explains. “It was really important to me to honour the legacy and not turn them into something else. I wanted to stay really true to the annual tradition.”
Planning for the annuals begins long before the highly anticipated December arrival date, usually about 14 months in advance. The team begins brainstorming around October for the next year, pinging ideas back and forth for stories, puzzles, and interviews.
“We try to be socially conscious and aware. We touched on homelessness and climate change this year and did a piece on gratitude and wellbeing, which ended up being really timely,” Lynn says. “Then we try to balance it with fun stuff, like the top 10 roller coasters or fictional time-travelling adventures. We try to have a nice balance.”
Once they have come up with ideas they think the children will connect with, Lynn makes a table of contents, balances the English and Irish content, and sends it to be signed off. Work then begins on the layout and puzzles and Lynn starts coordinating the editorial content with her fellow writer Natasha Mac a’Bháird.
“It’s very collaborative, there’s actually a lot of players,” Lynn says. “For example for Súgradh and Spraoi we always have a nice illustrated Christmas story every year. When Natasha sends me the story I read through it and suggest illustrations. Then we work with Baboom Design who makes the sketches and we agree on the illustrations and the same goes for the recipes and the crafts. There’s a whole lot of back and forth.”
Lynn says that it can be difficult to plan the annuals so far in advance, as the team never knows what the year is going to bring. 2020 was the perfect example, as the pandemic was still months away when the team began planning this year’s annuals.
“It’s tricky because we need to make sure what we’re planning is relevant. It’s always a bit of a gamble in some ways because you just don’t know what will be relevant in a year's time. One of the biggest challenges is also to strike the right note. I’m very aware, especially with the fifth and sixth class content, of not trying to sound cool,” she laughs. “I try to be sincere. I really care about the annuals and I take a lot of pride in them. I just want to be confident that everything is accurate, I take it very seriously.”
Lynn even sends drafts to her nephews, who are in second and fourth class, to make sure her writing makes sense to them. She considers their ideas too, with this year’s ‘Animals of Lapland’ piece in Spraoi coming from her nephew. “They get a great buzz off the fact that my name is in there,” she laughs when asked if she is the most popular aunt in Ireland.
“I just think striking that note of producing meaningful content without being preachy or talking down to kids is so important. Meeting them at their level is important in any educational context.”
One of Lynn’s favourite features to work on are the two interviews with sports stars and creative figures that feature in Sonas every year.
“I do the initial reaching out to see if people would be interested and nearly always their response is so positive. They just jump at it because they remember getting the annuals in school too,” Lynn says.
Cartoon Saloon’s Tomm Moore, whose movie WolfWalkers is tipped for an Academy Award, was delighted to be interviewed for this year’s annual. Other interviewees have included camogie star Anna Geary, soccer player Seanie Maguire, author Sarah Webb, and Marvel comic book artist Will Sliney.
“I do a lot of research and try to ask about meaningful things that will be relevant for the kids, like career and life advice, because it’s so important. I think every word we print matters because the annuals have such a huge reach into so many classrooms.” The team also tries to get as much feedback as they can in order to make sure the annuals stay interesting.
“If you look at Siamsa from 2017 to this year, we've hugely increased the number of articles and features because the feedback we got was that third and fourth class want more of the reading type content than the puzzles,” Lynn says.
All of the hard work that goes into the annuals has paid off so far, with over 30% of Irish schools buying the annuals every year and 10,000 annuals donated to charity each Christmas.
“I got a message from my sister who is a primary school teacher in Cork when they came out this year saying that three big boxes of annuals had arrived in her school and they were like gold dust,” Lynn says. “I was so delighted! It’s a great privilege to work on them.”
