The turkey farmer
Fintan Hogan has been surrounded by blood and feathers at his family business in Kells, Co Meath, for the guts of 40 years. And while he seems like a pretty cheery chap, he can be frazzled by the frantic nature of the run-up to Christmas.
By the time the big day dawns he’ll have processed (to use a gentle euphemism) more than 70,000 turkeys for starring roles on the most festive of Irish tables, and his pre-Christmas labours will help to feed as many as a quarter of a million people.
While moaning about the bird most fowl is a national pastime with phrases such as “oh, it is so dry” and “it doesn’t have much flavour” repeatedly uttered across the land towards the end of December, Hogan is having none of it.
No, literally: he is not having turkey for Christmas this year.
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He never has turkey on Christmas Day, in fact, and sides with beef instead. That is not to say he doesn’t like turkey, but he eats enough of it year round to earn himself a break and a steak.
The next few weeks will see him run ragged. “We are busiest from the start of November and have about 40 people year round and then another 70 for Christmas,” he says.
Over the four decades he has been talking turkey, he has seen big changes in our appetites. “What people are buying now is completely different than what they were buying 10 years ago. The whole bird is not nearly as popular as it used to be, and what the supermarkets want is butter-basted turkey breasts and turkey with bacon lattices and things like that, so that is what we do a lot of now.”
The 5-7kg birds he produces are by far the most popular, although the bigger the bird, the better the value. “The bone-to-meat ratio improves as the bird gets bigger,” he says.
For Hogan, the killing season starts at the end of November and while the process is largely automated now, he has vivid memories of a time when his family would hand-pluck turkeys and sell them “New York dressed”.
There’s so much pressure in the 10 days before Christmas because everything has to go out the door
It sounds like a mobster euphemism and it might well be, but in his work a New York-dressed turkey was “sold with the guts inside and the feet and head still on” – a common sight in shops in the 1980s.
In times past the family wouldn’t start the slaughter until December 13th to ensure the turkeys stayed fresh until Christmas Day. “There was no such thing as refrigeration and everything had to be hand plucked and hung from the rafters in our shed, where we’d leave the doors open so the wind could blow through,” he says.
Now, with modified atmosphere packaging, the turkeys are gas flushed, which sees them put into a bag in which the oxygen is taken out and replaced with CO2 to keep them fresh for weeks.
All the birds will be done for by Friday, December 13th, which is unlucky for them for sure.
That doesn’t mean Hogan can slack off.
“There’s so much pressure in the 10 days before Christmas because everything has to go out the door presented properly in the right packaging with the right labels and the right use-by date and with the greatest deadline ever, which is Christmas Day.”
The Christmas tree farmer
Christmas trees have been central to Martin Kelleher’s world since the early 1980s and he has grown his little patch from a single acre in Kildare then to about 60 now.
He can fit about 2,000 trees on to each of his 60 acres and, with a 10-year rotation, he harvests about five acres each year.
Christmas trees aren’t just for Christmas in his world. “I’m preparing from July onwards and am dealing with orders from the summer time but the real peak week is the weekend of the [Late Late Toy Show] and it’s on December 6th this year so that is perfect,” he says.
He sells to garden centres and supermarkets and direct to consumers who come out to the farm and pick for themselves on what amounts to festive family days out.
What advice would he tell people in the market for a tree?
“It is important to remember that outside a tree looks different to when it is inside and what looks small outside will be big when you bring it into the house,” he says.
They are a different type now and don’t shed as much as they used to but people are putting them up earlier so that is an issue
His various markets want different things. The retailers and garden centre like a tidy, uniform tree that might look nice on a shop floor while those picking the trees themselves tend to go for the higgledy-piggledy trees. “They like those ones because they can fit more decorations on them,” he says.
He loves it when families make tree picking into something fun rather than functional. “We have people that come every year and even when their kids grow up they all come back for Christmas to get the tree from us.”
The trees are definitely bushier and greener now. “They are a different type now and don’t shed as much as they used to but people are putting them up earlier so that is an issue,” he says.
In terms of his own schedule, it starts to get quiet five days before Christmas but then early in the new year it all ramps up again for a few days as he starts collecting and recycling the trees from some of his customers.
And is he much use at picking a tree himself and is he a man who can be counted on to make good choices for his customers? “I actually try and stay out of it when I am asked to pick the tree and maybe get one of the younger lads to help. What I can tell you is that if a man comes to buy a tree on his own he is in and out in five minutes but if a couple comes in they could be a couple of hours.”
The Christmas DJ
Ann Marie Walsh joined Christmas FM almost a decade ago, starting initially as an administrative assistant for the most festive of radio stations. Since then she has taken on more and more roles, however, and has been assiduously “moving up through the ranks over the years”. She is now in charge of marketing and presents a couple of programmes each week from the end of November until right after Christmas.
“The launch day is like the start of the season for so many people and the excitement from our listeners and the people who love Christmas FM is off the charts and that’s wonderful,” she says.
And what is the point of a dedicated Christmas station when virtually every other radio station is playing wall-to-wall Fairytale of New York and Last Christmas all the way through December?
“We’re here to entertain people and bring people together and make them feel closer to friends and families. We have a lot of listeners from all around the world,” she says. “We are not a charity radio station but we are a radio station that raises money for charities and that’s a huge part of what we do.”
And who decides what gets played when? “We don’t have a setting where a certain song has to be played a certain number of times but have a playlist and we take requests. We play the big, big tracks that people love at this time of the year but we also play some home-grown artists too and then we have a song contest every year.”
What is her favourite Christmas song? Is it Fairytale of New York, like most everyone else in Ireland? No, is the surprising answer.
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She doesn’t miss a beat. “It is 1,000,000 per cent Driving Home for Christmas. I’m from Kilkenny and when I was a kid I started on the local radio station there and I remember one of my brothers coming in to collect me from the radio station on Christmas Eve or maybe it was Christmas Day. I remember so clearly the two of us singing along to that song in the car going home, and it reminds me of family. It reminds me of singing with my brother. It’s just a beautiful song: it makes me feel so happy whenever I hear it.”
The panto dame
“I’m Dame Dottie,” says Robert Downes almost as soon as he answers his phone. “It is a dream come true to be able to say that,” he adds.
This is his third year as a panto dame and he will be giving it socks in Tickles and the Beanstalk in the Civic Theatre in Tallaght in Dublin all the way through December and beyond.
“It can be quite hard work because you’re doing two shows a day every day and it’s very physical,” he says.
It will eat into his partying and time with family but he reckons it is a sacrifice worth making. “Panto is such a big part of Christmas for families. We often have the same kids coming every year and you have whole families coming along and you are part of their Christmas and that makes it worthwhile. It is a really lovely thing to be able to be a part of.”
I think here we honour a type of woman: the Moore Street traders and the Dublin mammy who manages to keep everything together and can be very tongue in cheek
He works as an actor and coach year round with community and youth groups, but even as a young man he fancied being a panto dame.
“A few years ago I went for the audition even though I knew I was too young,” he says.
He didn’t get the role. Then two years ago he got a call from the writer and director of the Civic’s panto, Rob Murphy. “He said we are looking for a dame and that is how I ended up here. I have done some drag performance cabaret stuff as well and there’d be a lot of crossover.
“I did have to learn to do make-up myself but the one of the things I kind of love about being a dame is that there’s a level of being a clown as well as kind of feminising your face. You’d hardly call me beautiful: I’m more of a clown with pretty eyelashes and glitter,” he says, with a degree of self-deprecation.
He always looks to the tradition of panto dames in Ireland. “I think here we honour a type of woman, the Moore Street traders and the Dublin mammy who manages to keep everything together and can be very tongue in cheek.”
He says Murphy is skilled “at building in-jokes that go over kids’ heads but parents get and I have scope to improv and play around. It is not hard to know where the line is, there’s a lot of double entendre. There has to be something for the parents as well.”
Santa Claus
Without a shadow of a doubt, the busiest person on the planet in the run-up to Christmas is Santa Claus, and when The Irish Times contacts him through an elf intermediary in late November he is not best pleased with the interruption.
The initial interaction is more “Bah! Humbug” than “Ho ho ho, merry Christmas” and while we are shocked by the lack of cheer, we persevere.
Truth be told it is not hard to reach the root of his less than seasonal grumpiness. Like many of us, Mr Claus is close to buckling under the pressure of sometimes impossibly tight deadlines.
But unlike most of us – with the exception of Taylor Swift or Paul Mescal, perhaps – he is also burdened with the entirely unrealistic expectations of tens of millions of young folk all over the world and feels compelled to deliver every single time out of a deeply held fear of letting people down.
People are counting on him everywhere, from Athlone to Zimbabwe.
“Sorry, who is this? You want to talk to me about Christmas? I am sorry I can’t really talk right now. Can you call back in January?” he asks.
We can’t really ramp up production on the Irish deliveries until the Saturday morning after The Late Late Toy Show is broadcast
When we explain that we are actually doing a pre-Christmas feature and really need to speak to him immediately he pauses and then emits a deep sonorous sigh.
“I can give you five minutes, tops,” he says. “We’re mad busy right now and too many of the elves have been slacking off since the snow started falling here and to be honest I don’t really blame them.”
“I know their hearts are in the right place and they’re still happy to work long hours for nothing more substantial than a hearty meal and some good cheer at the end of the week, but the way the world has changed has made things a lot more difficult than they were when I was a young man.”
He sounds wistful as he recalls that “children only expected a couple of presents to be left under trees or in stockings right up to the 1970s and they were mostly made of wood and the odd bit of metal”. There was no plastic and no tech.
They were the good old days, he says. He used to love making and delivering “rag dolls and the wooden toys and train sets. The Stretch Armstrongs were fun to make and the tubs of slime and maybe a Rubik’s Cube and the Lone Rangers,” he says. “And I loved marbles,” he continues. “I still do really.”
But in the 1980s, everything “started to get so complicated. First there was Pong, that was grand – a simple console and a black and white tennis game. If only I knew where it would lead, I would have refused to deliver any of them,” he says. “Now we have the computer consoles and games and the phones and the tech. I am also dealing with the endless expectations that people have nowadays.”
He pauses. “Now I don’t know if I should tell you this but I blame the Late Late Toy Show. It’s just made things much harder. Don’t get me wrong. I love the Toy Show and I watch it every year on the Player thing that RTÉ has. But the timing is the problem. We can’t really ramp up production on the Irish deliveries until the Saturday morning after it is broadcast because that is when the lists really start to come in.”
Speaking of lists he has a word to say about that too. “Oh my sweet Rudolph, they just go on and on these days. Some come in and there are more than 10 items and that’s for one child. What happened to the list that had some kind of toy, maybe a pair of pyjamas and a small surprise? I am not suggesting we go back to the days when all I had to do was chuck a bag of marbles and an orange into each stocking but can you all dial it down with the demands?” he says, his impatience rising again.
“I think we should stick to the whole ‘Something you want, something you need, something to wear and something to read,’” he concludes. “Not only is it fun and practical, it also rhymes. Hard to argue with that, am I right?”
