New baby, new heart, new job, new lungs . . . Christmas often heralds a time of change and reckoning, writes Catherine Cleary
The hunt starts in the same way every year. I know exactly what I am looking for. Somewhere in a muddy field of seemingly identical specimens is my one perfect tree. It will have exactly the right amount of bushy branches so the central trunk is still visible. The branches will rise regularly and taper to one perfect knob at the top. I can forgive a bit of patchiness at the back. It can be angled into the corner. But mostly it is X Factorfor trees. The winner gets a ribbon tied around its branch and then it is chain-sawed, netted and carted home.
The trip to the Christmas tree farm has become a staple in the family calendar. Not this year, however. We will not be lugging two metres of Norway spruce through the door. We are having a minor transition Christmas in a house half the size of our home last year. There is no room for a Christmas tree. Life has shifted in the past 12 months and the past is that other country where things were done differently.
Christmas is all about a bit of permanence, the same old traditions dusted down from the same old attic. Whether you find them cloying or comforting, the rituals are difficult to avoid. Christmas is an island that we haul ourselves onto out of the raging rapids of life. Then we lie there with Jimmy Stewart's George Bailey, Kermit's Bob Cratchit and as many triangular green foil-wrapped Quality Streets as we can forage.
Surrounded with all this familiarity, the smell of pine needles roasting on radiators, the one-eared baby Jesus nestled in straw on the manger, it is inevitably a time for reflecting on what has changed in the year. For some people, the transition can be a happy one. For others going through a first Christmas after bereavement, separation or other loss, it can be intensely sad.
SINN FÉIN TD Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin will be relishing this Christmas more than any after surviving two heart attacks in the spring. "This will be a very special Christmas," he says. "I regard myself as very lucky as this is a Christmas that I might very well have missed." Ó Caoláin's wife, Bríd, rushed him into Monaghan General Hospital at around four in the morning one Friday in February. He had arrived home from the Dáil the night before and had not been feeling well since the previous night. "I fought it again foolishly," he says. And then it became overwhelming. "It was like an elephant sitting on my chest and as if I had weights suspended from my arms that I couldn't let go." At Monaghan, the cardiac consultant Dr Brendan MacMahon (at this point the TD not just name-checks but spell-checks the man who saved his life) immediately arranged to have the Sinn Féin TD transferred to Dublin. In an operating theatre in St James's Hospital he "had two arteries done".
His family was at the forefront of his thoughts in that long ambulance ride. "I have five children, from 21 down to six. My little boy was only five when this happened. Ó Caoláin's own father died 30 years ago in the first week of December from a massive heart attack.
"It was a terrible shock for my wife and children. I suppose I'm delighted to be given another chance to do everything a little better."
Now he is on daily medication and his doctors have recommended exercise and diet. As a result he enjoyed the physical challenge of the election campaign, his sixth as a Sinn Féin candidate.
"Outside of election time, the lifestyle is not perfect, with long hours, a sedentary workload, sitting in the Dáil chamber. It's not conducive to the programme the respective consultants would have recommended for me." He will be allowing himself a few treats at Christmas. "It's the first of many, I hope, that I could have missed."
NINETEEN YEAR-OLD PAUL MINCHIN was also rushed to hospital this year. In early July, the young Carlow man got half an hour's notice that a donor had been found for a double lung transplant. The phone call came just as he was on the way out for a check-up. His cystic fibrosis meant that he was on 24-hour oxygen and had little or no energy.
Minchin made history when he became the first patient to undergo a double lung transplant at the Mater Hospital in Dublin. "I never really let it get to me," he says, about his condition before the operation. "I just let every day come as it was." Six weeks after the operation he was released from hospital. Now his life has been transformed. He is hoping to be able to stop using a nebuliser soon. "I can do everything I wasn't able to do, walking up and down the stairs, walking up the fields to see to the sheep and cattle."
With four brothers and one sister, Christmas dinner at home on the family farm near Bagenalstown in Carlow is a big, noisy affair. Thrown into that is the lambing season, which usually starts about a week before Christmas. The turkey dinner usually sees at least one member of the family absent from the table in the lambing shed. They take it in turns, he explains, and this year he will be out there helping out.
"I was always mucking in, I suppose, but I wouldn't have been able to do anything too physical." Both he and his family will be thinking of another family somewhere this Christmas. "You'd have to think about the donor's family." Under the rules of the transplant programme he does not know anything about the donor, whether it was a man or a woman, or the circumstances of his or her death. His own family feel huge relief, he says. There will be much to give thanks for and reflect on as they gather around the table.
FOR JULIANA ADELMAN and her husband Martin Fanning, their quiet Christmas tradition is about to get a lot noisier. Their son Aidan was born on March 1st, and his arrival means they are trading in their quiet "just-the-two-of-us" Christmas for a visit to Juliana's parents in Boston.
A historian who has lived in Ireland for five years, she says she and her husband fell into a tradition of quiet Christmases together as soon as they got married. "We'd just moved into a new home, so we thought we'd just stay at home. We assumed we'd have to start alternating between trips to parents' houses but we managed to stick it out. It was so relaxing, like a vacation just listening to records and stuffing our faces.
"Before Aidan was born, we guessed it was going to be harder to resist going to one or other household." They will, however, be resisting the saccharine notions around "Baby's First Christmas" but Adelman is predicting that if anyone is going to crumble and buy a baby-sized Santa suit it will be her father. "Dad's Jewish and he's the big sucker for Christmas, not having had it as a child. We have a big celebration on Christmas Eve and my parents don't usually do Christmas dinner. It's the first time in four years we're all home. My sister is bringing her husband and my youngest brother will be home, too."
The most interesting thing that 10-month-old Aidan will enjoy, she predicts, will be "lots of shiny boxes full of wrapping paper and an array of low-hanging ornaments."
THIS TIME LAST YEAR Liam Doyle was sending out job offers after a round of interviews for new staff in the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin. The hotel had been shut for a protracted refurbishment and the hope was that it could open its doors in time for Christmas. Instead they managed "Christmas drinks with our local guests" last year, he says. Now in full swing, after opening on March 12th, there is never a quiet moment for the hotel's general manager. "It is just an institution at this time of the year," he says.
As a transition Christmas goes, this one is back to life as normal for Doyle, who has managed hotels for 20 years. "My experience is in hotels that were very successful at this time of the year. Before I came here, I was in the Ritz Carlton in South Beach, Miami, where the whole of New York descended for Christmas."
On Christmas Day, he will leave his wife Fiona Keogh-Doyle, nine-year-old Ciaran and five-year-old Ava, to come into the hotel. "The most important thing for me on Christmas Day is to come and thank the people who work here and thank the guests who are with us."
The profile of the person who books into the Shelbourne for Christmas is "a little bit of everything. They come here for the whole experience, two to three days of rest, to allow themselves to be pampered. Some are visiting family who might live locally and others use the restaurants and bars to have fun with their friends." There are a few small guests at the hotel every year and Santa Claus arrives on Christmas Eve. Until then, the 200-year tradition of afternoon tea in the Lord Mayor's lounge continues to attract crowds.
"We like to think we're polishing the traditions of old and they're very valuable to us. The New Year is a little bit different. It's a very busy evening because the Shelbourne is seen as a celebration hotel. It makes for a magical atmosphere."