In these uncertain times, we take more comfort than ever from Christmas being the same as it ever was, writes SHEILA WAYMAN
WITH ONLY “five sleeps” to go until Christmas Day, the ritual countdown has begun and everything we do becomes laden with significance and tradition.
The school Nativity play, the carol service, wrapping of presents and stringing cards over the mantelpiece, or a trip to see Santa, baking Christmas cookies, collecting the turkey, driving around the city at night to see the lights, walking home from Midnight Mass – these are just some of the pieces to be found in a festive jigsaw unique to each family.
Although a childhood Christmas often evolves into something quite different as young adults, parenthood has a habit of bringing us back to where we started. Couples blend family traditions and create some of their own, making memories for the next generation.
Living through uncertain times, we probably take more comfort than ever from Christmas being the same as it ever was. It is also now the only day of the year that (nearly) all commercial life stops – and is all the more special for that.
This Christmas will be different for singer Niamh Kavanagh, who is making her pantomime debut in Sleeping Beautyat Dublin's Tivoli Theatre. It means the former winner of the Eurovision Song Contest will have only two days off and she is missing the usual build-up back home in Carrickfergus, Co Antrim.
When she asked her sons Jack (10) and Tom (eight) if they would like to spend Christmas in Dublin this year, with granny and all the cousins, “I was met with a very stony silence”, she says.
“It is not that they don’t love their grandparents or their cousins but that is not the way we do things at Christmas.”
So, although it means a long commute for her, she is glad the boys wanted to stay put.
“I love that it is important for them to be in their home, which means Christmas is something to them in their home rather than in other people’s homes. I have done what my mum did, made it important.
“Christmas for me is so much about family and about the things that remind you – the routine is the thing I loved about Christmas Day.”
When she was growing up in Finglas in Dublin, she was always surprised that the one present she was allowed to open on Christmas Eve “mysteriously contained a nightie”. Brand new nightwear is a popular tradition – so children look their best for photographs around the tree, as well as in honour of the red-suited visitor, of course.
Kavanagh, one of four children, remembers lying in bed every Christmas morning wondering “is it time yet?”
The big rule was they all had to go down together, with their mother and father leading the way.
“There were six boys living next door to us and they were our indicator of whether Christmas had started or not. You could hear them going down the stairs.”
There was always a big fry to enjoy before going to Mass and afterwards a gang of them would go up to “Auntie” Doris, a friend of her mother, and they would all have to do a party piece – “nobody got away with it, even when boyfriends came they had to do their party piece, whether they could sing or not.” All before lunch.
"We tried to skive off then to see Top of the Popsand find out what was the Christmas number one."
It was back to their house for dinner before going off to another auntie’s house for more singing.
“That was the way we did it every year.”
The birth of her last sibling, Aoife, who is 15 years younger, allowed her to relieve the childhood magic, she explains, and prepared her “for the mummy thing”. But it was only after she and her husband, Paul Megahey, a musician and architectural photographer, had their two children that they really started creating their own Christmas at home.
She loves the pantomime, playing the Evil Queen, but it is hard being away from the family. This week she would normally be going to see Nativity plays and singing carols in her children’s school – although she thinks her eldest son is probably relieved to be spared the ordeal of having his mother performing in front of his friends.
“It will still feel Christmassy,” she stresses. “I am going to be in the panto – how more Christmassy can you be?”
Ireland East MEP Maireád McGuinness loves being at home in Co Meath for Christmas. “I am away so much during the year that being at home is a real treat. We all enjoy our food – the traditional fare of turkey, ham, lots of veg, pudding, trifle and yes, selection boxes.
“Christmas is a time to catch up with people – and I actually enjoy the rushing around before the 25th and the more restful days in the immediate aftermath.”
When she was growing up, it was always a very busy time of year on the family farm outside Ardee, Co Louth.
“My mother reared hundreds of turkeys for the local Christmas market, so there was always loads of work to do in preparing the turkeys.
“Everything was done on-farm – I can still remember the small chink of light leading from the yard towards the house and the endless hours my parents and uncle spent outside in the cold preparing the turkeys.”
People were calling right up to Christmas Eve to collect their turkeys, which “gave rise to lots of Christmas cheer”, she recalls.
Midnight mass was a must for at least half of the family of eight, after which chunks of the delicious baked ham were devoured.
“It was a real triumph when you were allowed to go to midnight Mass – this meant a shorter night waiting for Christmas morning and opening the toys.”
Christmas Day was always “a bit mad – too many boxes, wrapping and people to feed; selection boxes for breakfast were a must and boxes of sweets for tea were not unusual.
“We ate our Christmas dinner in the middle of the day and my mother always seemed delighted to get it over and finished with – I think she probably saw too many turkeys and had too much to do in the Christmas period to actually enjoy it!”
As a mother herself of four children, ranging in age from 10 to 18, McGuinness now understands what it must have been like for her mother.
“My mother always looked after the Traveller families who lived down the road from us. She cooked their Christmas dinner and we delivered it to them before we ourselves ate. Seeing people live under canvas in the cold, wet winters made us appreciate what we had.”
Her late father milked the cows over Christmas, as he did every day of the year. “Despite the weather he never seemed to resent getting out of bed early in the morning and milking the cows. He talked to them and I’m convinced they listened to him – even his singing!”
A man of simple pleasures, he enjoyed his Christmas dinner but always fasted on St Stephen’s Day.
Living now in Drumconrath, near Navan, McGuinness says a big plastic plug-in Santa, which they got when the older children were very small, is a big part of Christmas and lights up the front door of the house.
“Buying the Christmas tree [we have two] is a major ritual – that’s [husband] Tom’s job. I play no hand, act or part in it. He is very particular about the Christmas tree and if not satisfied with what’s available locally, he will travel for that perfect tree.”
They have only been away from home for Christmas once in the past 20 years. “Home is where the heart is – in any event, we have sheep that must be looked after and lambing starts in the new year.”
Author Denise Deegan relishes Christmas Day as a time to stop – although, as a self-confessed disorganised person, the run-up to it can be stressfully chaotic, she admits.
“I work really hard all the time and I like the fact that you have to stop.”
She recalls two different types of Christmas – the first from her early childhood and the second as a young adult.
“When you’re a small child and so excited in bed early on Christmas Eve and you can’t sleep and you hear things on the ceiling. I even saw Santa once putting a sock at the end of my bed.
“It is the most magical time of the year. I absolutely love it. I don’t know how we would get through the darkness and misery of winter without Christmas.”
The second sort of Christmases, when she was older, was about “crashing out and eating too much – less excitement, more gluttony”.
When she was little it was all about surprises and she has always done that with her children. “For the first time ever this year I have been presented with a list” – indicative perhaps of the fact she has teenagers in the house, Amy (15) and Alex (13).
One of her favourite traditions is that her husband Joe cooks Christmas dinner. “It would be a complete chore if I had to do it!” As it is just the four of them at home in Dalkey, Co Dublin, they are inviting some extended family over for the day.
As a child, her family moved house several times because her father was an engineer involved in the construction of power stations. She was born in Cork, then went to Kerry, back to Cork and finally up to Dublin.
“Because we weren’t always living in a place where my grandparents were, we were quite insular for Christmas. Just the six of us.”
She loved the old-fashioned decorations of coloured light bulbs strung across the streets in the little villages. “I miss the simplicity of that. I hate these sexy, cold blue lights.”
Another technological development that “drives me mental”, she says, is the business of tracking Santa on the internet.
“We used to track him in our imagination and it made it so exciting. The more mystery around Santa Claus the better. It creates so many questions in children’s minds – really, leave it!” she pleads.
Last year Amy had the idea of making up gift boxes for the homeless, with which she and her mother went around Dublin city centre last Christmas Eve, distributing them randomly to people on the streets. They will do the same this year, in one of the family’s newest traditions.
Getting used to the Irish way of doing Christmas
Segun Muga found Christmas Day “very quiet and boring” when he first moved to Ireland, compared with when he was growing up in his native Nigeria, where it was a time for going out to parks, visiting family and partying.
Unlike Dublin, shops would be open in Lagos, he explains, and buses keep running, but it is a public holiday celebrated by all in a country where nearly half the 150 million population is Christian and the other half Muslim.
Segun and his wife, Laraba, have got used to the Irish way of doing things and are now very happy to celebrate the day at home in Mulhuddart, Dublin, with their three children, Daniella (11), Elizabeth (eight), David (four) and Seguns sister Kemi (20).
On Christmas morning the family will attend a service in St Mark’s, a Pentecostal church on Pearse Street in Dublin, before returning home for a turkey dinner. In Lagos it would have been rice with chicken – “even if you haven’t eaten rice and chicken the whole year, you can be sure you will have chicken on Christmas Day”, says Segun, who was raised a Muslim but converted to Christianity when he was 25.
His children, of course, are excited about Santa and they will put out stockings for him – not something their parents did.
“The idea of Santa coming down the chimney will not hold water in Nigeria – we don’t have chimneys,” says Segun.
And, of course, Santa only comes to those who believe . . .
He thinks Christmas is highly commercialised in Ireland. “If care is not taken there will be a drift from the real essence of Christmas,” he adds.
“It is all about the birth of Jesus and, more or less, Jesus is being replaced by Santa now.”
