Sarah Harte: Christmas Eve Mass is uniquely beautiful — rampaging kids or not

A low point of my Christmas Eve Mass experience came when one small person liberated Jesus from the crib and whooped up and down the aisle

I changed my Mass time when I was living in South Dublin because, instead of focusing on the Christmas spirit, I longed to cuff the parents of overly lively children on the arm and say, your children are heading for a life of crime if you don’t rein them in.

Some believe Christmas Eve is when God entered the world in human form. Even if you don’t subscribe to the idea that today is Jesus’s birthday (perfectly legitimate), odds are you might agree that tonight has a singular quality.

Everything shuts. Shops. Pubs. Bookies. The wheel of Mammon stops turning. No cars on the road, just a candle in the window. There’s something deeply elemental about it. That hushed, still sound.