It was the moment Christmas got off to a flyer, courtesy of granny

THE year my grandmother threw the turkey on the kitchen floor was the best, by a mile.

Not that she did it deliberately.

None of us would ever, for a moment, have suspected her of evil intent to the bird. How could we? She almost tracked that turkey from egg upwards, in order to make sure it was fit for family consumption, the way she did every year.

By the time the grandchildren were five, they could imitate her turkey spiel, the way kids now sing television ads. It came from Mr Geoghegan, and Mr Geoghegan could be trusted. Not like a lot of farmers who just did turkeys at Christmas to make money.

We had the idea that Mr Geoghegan, who none of us ever met, and whose first name we never learned, did turkeys at Christmas as an art form, for the appreciation of a select few aficionados.

The grandchildren also grew up with a completely false notion of turkeys. We thought they were always the size of an ostrich with obesity issues.

This was because my grandmother had two daughters and nine sons, most of whom got married and had several children, all of whom pitched up for lunch on Christmas Day in her house, so the turkey had to feed about 60 people. It was a mystery that it could, subsequently, generate leftovers, but my grandfather always maintained, with some bitterness, that he was eating turkey in various guises until St Patrick’s Day.

Even if Mr Geoghegan got the scale and feeding of the bird right, my grandmother still worried about its dryness. She did a sort of consumer satisfaction survey on each and every guest, on each and every Christmas Day, checking if they thought it wasn’t a bit dry.

My sister gave me an awful kick under the table the year I said it didn’t matter if it was dry, weren’t we all going to be pouring gravy on it anyway?

The bird was made to fit into the oven — somehow — in the middle of the night and left there to cook, except for constant visitations for basting and worrying in equal measure by nana. Eventually, it was placed on an oval plate the size of the Isle of Man and brought to the table for us all to greet it with wonder and joy.

This one year, however, it made it onto the warmed oval plate fine, and then our grandmother turned to face her audience. So quickly did she turn that the turkey left the plate like a ball leaves Federer’s racquet — all topspin and speed.

Not bad on distance, either. It hit the heavily decorated table doing about 30km/h and headed longways through the glasses, salt cellars and lemonade syphons, gathering the tablecloth with it like a bridal train.

When it ran out of table, it made an attempt to get to the sideboard but, dropping short, landed on the floor in front of Tony the spaniel, who always stayed, safe from being stood on, inside the four legs of the TV table in the corner. Tony nearly had a seizure. Not only had this huge brown hot thing arrived without warning, but it blocked his escape.

First and only time I ever saw a spaniel cry, although Tony’s grief was nothing compared to my grandmother’s. She threw her apron up over her face, a gesture I later saw in productions of Riders to the Sea but at the time thought she had invented, and she keened like a banshee.

The younger kids were unbothered by any of this because they hadn’t much in the way of embedded memories of the way the turkey was usually served, and therefore assumed this was normal.

Their fathers exchanged glanced filled with covert “fair dues to her” admiration: It had been a hell of a throw. My mother rose and put her arms around her own apron-concealed mother. And my sister lost her usually formidable disciplined self-control. She laughed.

She roared laughing. She put her hands over her face to stifle it, but it spurted out between her fingers. Which made everybody else laugh, too, although my aunt grabbed a table napkin and put it over her mouth with an oddly Victorian gentility.

Two of my uncles then did a sensible thing. One of them gathered up his end of the tablecloth and his brother did the same at the other, with stragglers removing cutlery and crockery until they could carry the avian corpse back out to the scullery, all the time assuring my grandmother that it had touched nothing in its flight.

I thought this was an awful lie, but my sister explained that they meant it hadn’t touched the floor, and so was still pristine and germ-free. The floor was pristine, too, although this didn’t seem to be a priority.

My mother took my grandmother to the sitting room, where nobody ever went, partly because its chairs were covered in horsehair, which gave bare legs the sensation of being stabbed with a million small needles.

Back in the kitchen, my sister organised everybody into a kind of battlefield triage. Uncle Donal was to retrieve and dispose of the broken glass. This he did impressively, capturing the tiny slivers using the gloopy side of a bar of soap.

Auntie Maura was to find another tablecloth. The rest of us were to wash and dry the cutlery. Tony the spaniel, having no allocated function, went to sleep.

By the time my mother brought Nana back, her apron sodden with tears, everything was almost perfect, although the turkey looked as if it had been through a fight and the ham was so perfect, it seemed to be looking down on the dishevelled bird.

My grandfather, who had gone out into the garden and smoked his pipe during the repairs, was heard to mutter that the next time she was going to wreck something, maybe she’d start with the Brussels sprouts. This caused a fresh onset of tears, from which we were all distracted by an explosion in the scullery.

The lemonade syphon, fortunately sitting in the sink, its fizziness exacerbated by unexpected travels and collisions, had lost its top and was fountaining its contents at the ceiling.

IT WAS at this point that Ronnie, the budgie, spoke for the first time. “Give us a kiss,” it instructed everybody. “Give poor Ronnie a kiss.”

“Later,” my sister said crisply. “We’re a bit busy.”

We spent the next hour reassuring my grandmother that all was well, although she kept spotting bits of turkey juice on the wallpaper and getting upset all over again. At least nobody was dumb enough to tell her that firing the turkey around made it a lot easier to serve, since its legs were already semi-detached.

But the fact is that, of all the Christmas dinners she ever cooked, this was by far the most delicious. And memorable. Not that we learned from it, in the years directly thereafter.

It takes a while to realise that great Christmas memories cannot be created. They just happen.