“It looks like it might be a gezellig Christmas”

FLUENT in Dutch, my sister uses the odd Dutch word once in a blue moon when she can’t find an English one to do as good a job. She’s on the phone now.

‘This Christmas is going to be gezellig,’ she says, with a wriggle of pleasure in her voice.

I first heard her Dutch husband use the word ‘gezellig’ years ago. My sister and I had been for a swim on the beach with the children. In the absence of our husbands — who’d swum off an hour earlier and appeared as two tiny black dots on the horizon line — we stood in an Irish summer typhoon force 8, wearing icy wet togs and trying to towel off six children with three towels beneath a raised rear car door.

Having stuffed the children into the back of the car, we made them sand and cheese sandwiches with hands that the cold had rendered as dexterous as feet, after which we dried ourselves on wet towels and got in the front. There we sat in shingle and grit, looking out through the fogged-up windscreen wondering: (a) how Ireland was still inhabited, (b) whether the husband dots were getting bigger or smaller, and (c) how the ratio of husband:wife fun, had swung from the preferred ratio of 50:50 to 90:10 in favour of husbands so quickly.

After a villainous half-hour, the typhoon blew over. The children stopped whingeing and got out of the car. It seemed as if the dots were starting to get bigger and bigger. Finally, the dots grew arms and legs and emerged from the sea, at the point where my sister and I were thawing slowly, having wondered about the husband:wife fun ratio in earnest for quite some time.

“This is gezellig,” my sister’s husband said, taking a sausage that was spitting fat on the disposable BBQ and casting his eye over the children playing harmoniously with buckets. I asked him to translate, but my sister answered for him. “It means something between cosy, sociable and fun,” she said. She was aiming for a neutral tone, but when she said, “you’d use the word gezellig to describe a situation where people get together and everything works out well for everyone,” I thought her aim fell short.

“It doesn’t mean perfect,” she stabbed a sausage hard and continued more levelly, ‘just nice, really nice.”

“Why’s your Christmas going to be so gezellig?” I ask her now on the phone.

“Wait for it,” she says.

“What?” I say.

“I’ve got news for you,” she says. There’s that little wriggle of pleasure in her voice again.

“What news?” I say.

“Wait for it,” she says.

I let a split second pass. In the breathless manner of a war correspondent who’s under enemy fire, she delivers this news: “There’s a two-hour special of Downton Abbey on Christmas Day evening!” In her normal voice she says, “and Strictly Come Dancing’s on just before! What more could you want?”

“Nothing,” I say truthfully.

There are all sorts of Christmases. Most of us have had Christmases that have passed us by, ones with the spirit drained out of them for one reason or another. A couple of mine, for example, have been crushed by Crumlin hospital admissions. Another got lost in a whirl of arrangements for a family funeral and last year’s nearly buckled under the weight of Dublin Airport, cancelled flights and snow. There are Christmases that tip into farce, such as at my sister’s last year when “Uncle Herbert found a bottle of brandy while we were out at mass and when we came back, he opened the door and pissed his pants.” Or the one before, where she had to calm her sister-in-law down, after the gift of a cardigan from her mother, size: 16, colour: mustard.

And then there are ordinary Christmases. Not perfect but nice, just really nice. This year, we’re staying at home. And my son’s coming home from North Carolina. My daughter’s medical condition is not as clinically fragile as it was once and the plumber came to fix the oil boiler at last so the radiators are working again. I’ve made a Christmas cake for the first time under the kind supervision of an old friend (thank you, Liz) and our presents are wrapped under the tree.

With a red biro ring circling Strictly and Downton in the TV guide, it looks like it might be a gezellig Christmas. And I wish each of you one of these.