Michael Moynihan: Home is where the heart is — especially this Christmas

I had an abstract idea that Christmas existed beyond the county bounds, but how would it measure up?

A busy English Market in Cork city yesterday as people get ready for the Christmas holidays. Picture: Dan Linehan

One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep.

Dylan Thomas was not referring to Cork when he wrote the lines above — the title, ‘A Child’s Christmas in Wales’ — tells you immediately that his focus was a couple of hundred miles to the east.

He was right about the extent to which one Christmas can be much like another, though, particularly when you get to a certain age. The festivities blur into each other.

For our family, there are plenty of memories to draw from, those legendary Christmas stories that every family keeps dear.

There was the time one present was activated too early, in the form of a boisterous table football match in the kitchen; this woke one of the older kids at about 2am on Christmas morning, and when he strolled bleary-eyed through the kitchen door he saw Donal Moynihan Senior (managing the blues) and Fr Jim O’Donovan (head coach, reds) poised mid-match, an unlikely pair of Santa’s elves.

The sleepy child was directed back to bed and woke the following morning thinking, ‘Did I . . . ?’

On another Christmas Day, all hands were snoring through the post-meal coma, Steve McQueen wearing a selection from the Gap in The Great Escape on television, until someone pointed out that the twins, still toddlers, were absent.

They were discovered sitting on the table going through the turkey like a couple of land piranhas: a photograph of the two of them, focused on stripping off the white meat, dark meat, skin, bones, and entrails, still exists.

Later your columnist had a Christmas or two in America, which was difficult enough for all concerned. There was a carefully timed phone call one year which ended up with the receiver in Cork being passed from one member of the family to the other.

They all deny they missed me now, of course, but there was a reason everyone only spoke for less than their allotted time, and it wasn’t the cost of the call. It was the fact that a member of the cast was missing, even temporarily.

Conflating the season and the location, Christmas and Cork, is easily done when you spent the season nowhere else growing up. And the location was everything: even as a child I probably had an abstract idea that Christmas existed beyond the county bounds, but whatever form that might take it surely didn’t measure up to our venues.

The early visit to Santa — in the old Cash’s, or am I misremembering, as Dylan Thomas said? — and then around to the coffee shop in Roches Stores. That meant stepping down from the car park, where Merchants Quay shopping centre now stands, into the half-underground cafe, the hiss of an espresso machine, a glass of ice-cold lemon, and a Thompson’s chocolate slice.

Looking in at the books in the old Mercier Bookshop or, later, Con Collins’s. Taking in Planes, Boats and Trains on the way down to the family’s favoured sports outlet, Ludgate O’Keeffe’s on Parnell Place, for a pair of football boots that might first get turf lodged in the studs before 6am on Christmas Day.

(Always adidas. Always.)

Whatever the model of the football boot, it could never match up to the all-time greatest number-one Christmas present yours truly ever received.

A Timpo Wild West Fort, complete with valiant members of the Seventh Cavalry holding off a band of Apache. A quick search on eBay reveals same in good condition available for £80 (£20.26 postage if you wanted it in time for the 25th).

I have to confess that even now I was tempted.

One reason I didn’t bite was that the original I received almost half a century ago shines bright in the memory still. As bright as the place I found it, our old front room.

Which brings me to my point. It’s a different Christmas for me and my family this year, because while it’s a Cork Christmas, it’s without the two people who always made it a Cork Christmas for us.

One of the two people who always made Christmas for us was my father, who never knowingly missed out on a trip to Santa Claus; who would, with the slightest encouragement, have brought us to Santa Claus three or four times every December, no matter how old we got.

The other person who made Christmas for us was my mother, who produced a stunning feast every December 25 to feed seven hungry people, though the seven expanded significantly over the years as the family drew others into the trap-forged bonds with new loved ones, I mean.

Now both of them are gone, and the place where they made those Christmases for us is different as well. Since my mother passed away in May, our house won’t be a noisy operations centre on the 25th for the first time since it was built almost 50 years ago. Does Christmas even exist in a house if there’s no one there to celebrate it?

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The one consolation, odd though it sounds, is that someone else will live in the house soon. At first, I thought I’d feel a vague resentment at the prospect of people moving through the rooms where I grew up (grew up? I can remember hindering my father and uncles as they built them). I thought I’d see them as intruders — a natural enough reaction, probably.

Any such resentment didn’t last long. The more I thought about the house, the more I remembered the great times we had there. There were all the big life events: the news of victories and defeats, weddings and births, homecomings and leave-takings — and yes, those terrible days when bad news had to be delivered in the same place.

 But there was also the beauty of the ordinary, which is heartbreaking in the rear-view mirror. In for tea after school on a cold winter’s evening, parka sodden on the back of a chair; standing out in the garden for photographs the sunny morning of a Confirmation; getting loaves from the bread man at the gate.

Those were the really great times, in retrospect. The sense of security that comes through the slow passing of unremarkable days, days when you took it all for granted. In our house, we always knew those days would roll on because our parents made sure they did. As another poet said, nothing in the whole world was lacking. It is later one realises.

I don’t have any curiosity about the people who will move into the house, but I hope it becomes a home for them. My Christmas wish is that the beams and bricks of that house reflect their great days back at them, and that they’re happy there. We were.

Enjoy the holidays.