How December 8 became the country's biggest shopping day and the start of Christmas
The Munster Arcade, the Munster & Leinster bank, Cudmore's and Cash's can be seen in a busy Christmas scene in St. Patrick's Street, Cork, December 1961. Ref. 97M
December 8 was always the traditional start of the Christmas season.
The date was, for many years in rural Ireland, set for rural families to head to the cities for a huge annual shopping excursion, mobbing the local businesses in search of presents and other supplies, and fitting a big lunch in along the way, if it could at all be helped.
"They couldn’t cope, it was so busy,” Catherine Leader, of Leaders' Menswear on North Main Street, told this parish's Claire O'Sullivan in 2012.
"I remember when whole families would be standing there, waiting to be kitted out. I suppose it was a time when there wasn’t as many cars. People practically did their shopping for the next six months. All the clothes, shoes, underwear, any goods for the house, they were all bought that day."
In Dublin, newspaper lifestyle sections, like those in the Irish Times, were still advising local home-makers to avoid the big shopping destinations, lest they be caught in the rush.
Such was the influx of travelling business still drawn to the city by the allure of its lights, and a choice of outlets you still really didn't have in the towns.
Suburban life had solidified itself in the expanding east-coast cityscape also, with businesses reporting brisk trade for the following few days, as commuting householders would enter the fray to investigate what would be left before major restocks were carried out.
Traffic was a major concern for city centres, with gridlock invariably occurring, and governments of the day encouraging shared cars and laying on extra public transport for the day that was in it.
“With all the country motorists who will be in town, any Dublin motorists who can do so should leave their cars at home,” said Charles Haughey, in 1960.
Then a secretary for minister of justice Oscar Traynor, he curtly added, “Dublin housewives would be well-advised to leave their Christmas shopping for some other day.”
It all seems like an age that's a bit more bygone than it really is, such is the exponential pace of the world in the last few decades.
"Unfortunately, it's not like that anymore", said Ms. Leader, in the 2012 interview. "Year by year, it has faded."
Cars began to proliferate in the 1950s and 1960s, which led to out-of-town shopping centres attracting big-name anchor tenants, in turn pushing out city-central opening hours, and escalating the importance of in-person spectacles like Christmas lights, window displays and Santa's Grottos to draw people out and in the doors.
Now we have online shopping, 24 hours a day, available at our fingertips, with colossus-like figures like Amazon straddling the commercial landscape, while local businesses moving online survive and thrive from the support of dedicated customers. If you're like this writer, and the season is more about seeing people, you'll happily make your list, and start organising, buying and hiding stuff around the house sometime in October.
Black Friday and Cyber Monday have supplanted days like December 8th in societies and economies worldwide, providing deals aplenty over the past few years, but raising annual questions about bigger chains' bulk-buy business models, and the sustainability of overproduction to feed demand.
The consensus in the business community in recent years has been that 'farmer's day' has become a normal day like any other in the run-up to Christmas, with retail owners and city-dwellers of a certain vintage often bemoaning the passing of a staple in their working calendar.
But perhaps December 8th, and the ritual of getting into brick-and-mortar shops to tick off some of the last few boxes, isn't quite dead yet.
And you can be sure Cork retailers will be relishing that fact.
- This article was first published on December 8, 2020
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