Jarlath Regan
I laugh and almost cry when I think about trying to get home from London for our first emigrant Christmas in 2014. The climax involved my wife, our four-year-old son and I crammed into a beat-up Honda Accord hurtling towards Holyhead, scrambling to make our ferry on December 21st.
Only those who have lived abroad can fully understand the emotional and logistical obstacle course of getting home for Christmas. I was only coming home from flipping England, but each year it nearly broke us.
The cost of flying was astronomical, so we decided we’d try to drive. The plan was simple. We’d drive up north to Birmingham first. I’d do a spot at a comedy club to earn some cash, and we’d head straight for the boat after I got off stage. Of course, the show ran over time. Tina and Michael were sitting in the car outside the comedy club with the engine running, knowing every minute was vital. I practically jumped in the window of the car Dukes of Hazzard-style, and we hightailed it for Wales in the dead of night.
When we got to the port, we were so late it felt like we had to jump from the pier to get on board. To say the sea crossing was rough would be like saying DJ Carey was a little untrustworthy.
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I remember plates, chairs and cutlery flying off the shelves, people lunging for the toilets, my wife being horribly ill while my son lay in my arms fast asleep. We somehow made it home at daybreak, just in time for a slap-up fry at my in-laws’ house.
That first Christmas home was so heartbreaking and heartwarming at the same time. We never wanted to leave. Since we had emigrated, our hearts had not stopped aching for all the craic and the familiarity of home.
When we told people we got the ferry back they’d say, “So much easier to go by boat isn’t it?” My wife and I would share a glance and say: “It’s so relaxing.”
Jarlath Regan’s book The Gobshite Guidebook is out now. His new show Gas Man goes on tour in January, see jigser.com
Alison Spittle
We take food seriously in my family. Most of our deaths are food-related. I’ve seen my English dad sulk off to bed at 10am after challenging his father to a fist fight on Christmas morning because his dad, also English, objected to including fried bread in the Christmas breakfast.
My grandad had strong values when it comes to food. He once threatened to throw the whole family out on St Stephen’s Day because Dad wanted to put the leftover turkey in a curry. Grandad decreed, “It’s cold cuts or you can leave and fend for yourselves”.
We are not well off but we have expensive taste, literally. We love bougie food. If a box says luxury, hand cut, corn fed Christmas puddings, in swirly writing, we’re buying it.
My dad is a builder and we had a couple of years when he was in a wheelchair, so some years would be richer than others, but we always splashed out on fancy food. The way we’d make it work was through the power of the yellow sticker.
Every Christmas Eve, the supermarkets would discount their Christmas food a couple of hours before closing, leading to the most intense family supermarket sweep ever. You could get a Christmas dinner fit to inflict gout on all your loved ones for the price of a bucket of fried chicken, which, ultimately, will do the same thing but is far less classy.
The stakes were high – if you messed it up you could end up with sea bass for your main, which, incidentally, isn’t actually bad with stuffing.
[ ‘I am the Grinch,’ one friend told me as I teased him about disliking ChristmasOpens in new window ]
Our family would plan a military campaign to get the best yellow sticker stuff – the smaller kids would procure the crisps, crackers and chocolates, the fun bits. Parents and the oldest child, me, would go after the meat and potatoes. We would sweep five supermarkets, hitting the high-end ones first for the refrigerated treats. It was like D-Day, with the plan to end up in the heart of German territory, either Lidl or Aldi.
There are people I still give dirty looks to just because they grabbed eight packs of Gü desserts in the reduced aisle before I had the chance. That’s 16 key lime pies – who’s going to eat 16 key lime pies in 12 hours?
I mean I would, but I’d have to be pretty depressed. I hope that person was at the lowest ebb in their life, that’s the only way I can feel okay about that situation.
Isn’t that what Christmas is about? Wishing your enemies a worse Christmas than you?
May their turkey smell slightly off and be too dry for leftover sandwiches, and may they pick a mediocre film for all the family to watch on Christmas night.
Alison Spittle’s show Big is currently on tour, see alisonspittle.com
Kevin Gildea
One Christmas in the 1970s, when I was a kid, I did a naughty thing.
It was 2am. I was in the kitchen moving very quietly because I was robbing chocolate biscuits from a tin of Afternoon Tea. It involved gently lifting the crinkly plastic top tray to get at the remaining chocolate ginger circles on the bottom layer, and then replacing them with plain biscuits, leaving one chocolate one on top to hide the crime.
Giddy on all the chocolate, I contemplated the small crib on the dresser. It was a cardboard affair with nicely detailed six-inch high holy figures gathered in the usual positions.
“Wouldn’t it be fun if ...?” whispered the Devil on one shoulder.
“Yes, it would!” exclaimed the angel on the other shoulder.
I got the RTÉ Guide, and my scissors. I proceeded to cut out the faces of the famous and entertaining. Then I got my plastic pot of glue and proceeded to stick a new face on each traditional holy face:
The blessed Virgin became Joanna Lumley, aka Purdey from the New Avengers. Joseph now looked on with the eyes of Dick Van Dyke. The three wise men – Bunny Carr (brought Quicksilver), Gay Byrne (brought a box of Frankincense, plus one for everybody in the audience) and Tom Riordan, from The Riordans (brought fresh hay). All gathered around the smiling upturned face of the baby Jesus, who now wore the face of Santa.
I stood back, all sugared up and giddy, laughing as I glued Charles Haughey’s face on to the star.
Four biscuits and another cup of tea later I had second thoughts. I couldn’t do it! I decided to pull the faces off, but the faces underneath came off too. So I had to draw in faces with marker on the two I’d done – the baby Jesus now smiled up with a big simple smile and dots for eyes, like a happy E tablet.
I went to bed stifling my giddy guffaws.
The next morning, needless to say, my parents did not find it so funny.
Kevin Gildea’s Brilliant Pop-Up Bookshop is back open in Dún Laoghaire in Dublin until February 1st, downstairs in Board and Brewed on York Road.
Enya Martin
At Christmastime when I was 16, I was working in a bike shop as part of the work experience module in transition year, with another guy from my class. We basically just put bikes together all day every day for the month of December.
He only trusted me to put the wheels on, as the rest of the process was very hands-on and complex. We were kept very busy with all the bike sales for Christmas.
One day he said I could attempt to put a full bike together. It took me twice as long as it would take him, but I completed it nonetheless and was so smug. The cheek of him to think a woman wasn’t capable of a man’s job! The parents came to collect the bike for their kid that evening and they were over the moon. I was seriously starting to consider a new career path. Enya’s Bikes! Made by women, for women!
I was still working there in January. I had been moved to the tills, as bike sales had obviously dropped. One morning when the shop was quiet a customer walked up the stairs. I recognised him – it was one of the parents I had made that one and only bike for.
“Howya” I said. “How’s the bike going?” He proceeded to produce a set of handlebars from behind his back, “You mean this one?” Safe to say I found a career I am actually good at, and it doesn’t involve a spanner or an injury claim.
Enya Martin’s new show Acting the Divil is on tour in spring 2026, including Vicar Street on March 6th. Follow her on Instagram @gizalaugh_ for more information.
Rosie O’Donnell
It was Christmas 1971, Commack, Long Island, New York. I was nine. Mom, Dad and my four siblings were decorating the fake tree. Dad was still smoking then, melancholic by nature and stressed out by his busy life as the head of the O’Donnell family. And now the Christmas tree was crooked. This was not a good start to the festivities.
Mom asked Dad to fix it so he got some rope, hammered a nail into the wall and went to work using a hastily improvised pulley to straighten the tree. Even nine-year-old me could tell this was an unorthodox method unlikely to succeed. But I also knew better than to ask my dad questions.
We all watched as the tension rose between my mom and dad. It was the wrong time to laugh but I couldn’t help it, the scene was so funny I started to giggle. My mom turned to tell me to quit laughing and at that exact moment my dad slipped and crashed right into the tree, toppling it over, smashing the delicate baubles and causing a technicolour mess all over the living room.
By this stage I was laughing hysterically. As punishment I was sent to my room. I missed out on making Santa’s cookies that year. I could smell them baking in the kitchen as I read a Nancy Drew mystery. Santa came to me anyway, despite my untimely mirth. Maybe he found it funny too. I got Barbie’s Country Camper – the only thing on my list – and treasured it for years.
Rosie O’Donnell’s show Common Knowledge is at the Waterfront Hall in Belfast on March 19th, 2026. See waterfront.co.uk
Gearóid Farrelly
Christmas has always been a big deal in my family. I have five siblings so growing up, Christmas morning was always chaos. I could never sleep on Christmas Eve. I was the eldest and I should have led by example; all my siblings were usually out like a light but my brain would whirr all night. Even the slightest noise would cause me to tear down the stairs in my dressing gown singing “Rudolph the red nosed reindeer”. I would find my parents watching the 9pm news. It was a long night for them.
Sometime in the mid-80s my sister asked for the A La Carte Kitchen, which was a plastic kitchen on a cart. In the TV ad (which is on YouTube) a little girl goes full trad wife and makes an unnerving meal of beans and then plonks a jam Swiss roll in the middle of it. She then rushes to a bedroom and grabs the big toe of a middle-aged man – presumably her father – to feed him this culinary mess.
Apparently Santa had informed my parents that he could not get this toy anywhere, so they gently steered my sister in other directions and in the run up to the big day, the A La Carte kitchen faded into the background. That Christmas Eve, I tried to put myself to sleep by attempting to remember what all my brothers and sisters had asked for. I remembered the kitchen and the weird bean and Swiss roll meal. As we were walking down the stairs – probably at 3am – to see what Santa had left, I reminded my sister what she had asked for and assured her it was definitely going to be there because Santa promised. My poor bleary eyed parents who had probably only got to bed a half an hour prior came behind us chewing their fists.
I had a habit of saying the wrong thing at Christmas. In the run up we would all be given 10 pounds and brought to Donaghmede shopping centre to buy presents for each other.
Once we had been through our piles from Santa on Christmas morning, we would all give each other our presents. It was a lovely tradition. Until the year I handed over my presents for my parents – if memory serves me correctly, a tennis ball and a litre of bleach – and asked, “So why do we all buy presents for you and each other, and you buy us nothing?”… followed by a chorus of versions of the same realisation from my siblings.
“Oh for fu ...”
Various veins twitched in my exhausted parents’ temples as they stammered an excuse that they actually helped Santa. This made no sense to me ... “So you write to Santa and what ... send him money or do you ring him?” A chocolate coin was rammed into my mouth and from the following year, we each got a present under the tree labelled “Love Mam and Dad”.
It felt like I had made an impact. I would have murdered me.
Gearóid Farrelly’s Gearoid Rage and No Pressure tour is on for dates in 2026/27. See gearoidfarrelly.com/tour
Emma Doran
For years we went to my mam’s for Christmas. But she was searching for someone else to do the Christmas dinner. The obvious candidate would be her only daughter, but I obviously wasn’t up to the task.
A few years ago, I’d moved into a new house – me and my fella and the kids – and I was having my mam and dad over for Christmas dinner.
To me it was a big deal. We had just bought the place, it was really exciting. It was lashing rain that day and the roof in the kitchen started leaking. Because we had only just moved in, we only had the bare essentials in terms of pots and pans, so I had to use the pot from the ham to catch the leaking water, which was drip drip dripping down exactly where my parents were sitting. So it was my mam, my dad, and between them was the pot from the ham to catch the leak.
My mother hasn’t been back to my house on Christmas Day since. She now goes to my sister-in-law, who is Canadian. Having a foreigner in the mix added a bit of spice for my mam. And that’s set in stone now.
The story of the leak and the ham pot spread throughout the family and now no one comes to my house for Christmas. It’s kind of a blessing in disguise, really. I’m not a homemaker. It’s not my forte.
I do love the Christmas dinner, but it’s the attention to detail I’d be missing – the fancy tablecloth and the fancy glasses and all that, bores me to death. I appreciate it when other people do it but I kinda get to the point where I’m just like, it’s graaaaand.
Now, if the Canadian sister-in-law would like to start inviting me to dinner I would appreciate that as well. She has a bigger house than me.
Emma Doran’s show Emmaculate is currently touring Ireland and the UK. See emmadorancomedy.com
Photographs: Alan Betson
Hair and make-up: Hillary O’Reilly and Lauren Gill hillary.ie
