I used to love Christmas. It must have been around the mid-1970s when I was only a cub and the other end of Fermanagh seemed a very long way away. I was living with the mother and the father in a mountainous housing estate called Hillview and from up there we could see everything: the town itself, the Mill Lough, the Pound Brae, Kilmacormick Number One, Kilmacormick Number Two, Cornagrade, Derrygore, the bacon factory and Tunney's Meat Packers. Up in that pebble-dashed estate on dark winter evenings we kept ourselves warm with anthracite and furnacite and cozy electric lights that made the misty hillsides look like giant Christmas trees in all directions.
On those shiny-black nights leading up to Christmas, myself and my pals were dangerous men. We used to pour kettles of water on the footpaths and wait for it to freeze. This was to create our very own polished ice worthy of Wordsworth - and an actual death-trap. Rooney's path became the Cresta Run and we took it in turns to launch ourselves headlong on the slide, zooming down at terrific speeds in brown, quilted anoraks and awkward gloves that looked like shovels. Most of us also wore balaclavas hung around our necks in a torture of itch and sweat. We wore them because our mothers made us wear them. We would get our deaths if we didn't.
But coming up to Christmas, our deaths did not concern us at all. Taking our reckless downhill sprints was all speed and exhilaration and was as close to flying as we could get - as near a thing to doing the impossible - a magical opportunity to briefly defeat what we knew to be the case. We were like a new set of superheroes; suddenly unencumbered by any earthly force and we went clean mad - crouching only at the very last minute into a hunkered descent, baring our teeth to the wind without the slightest regard for the lamp-post, the briars or the palings that waited at the bottom. We were entirely fearless in the suspended reality of the season.
And it was a thrill just to be allowed out so late in this weather, licensed to yahoo in the darkness when the fog rolled up off the lough and the odd cry of a water-hen echoed up out of nothing. Below us, Enniskillen was up to its shoulders, and only the space rocket spire of the cathedral and the Eiffel-Tower-aerial of the barracks with its red lights nosed through. The mountains themselves had long vanished and the strip of Lucozade lights along the Cornagrade Road was our only connection with the silent town. Far from it all, up in our cold Olympic Village, we felt remote and yet very secure in ourselves because we were full of it. Taking on the ice and the darkness with near demonic confidence, all the time whispering about ghosts and poltergeists and dead cats. In those long freezing nights we would have believed anything - and we did.
The one thing we didn't believe in was Santy Claus. For us to swallow anything whole, it had to be terrifying - not necessarily evil, but certainly unnatural. A large fat man in all that red gear was just plain daft. We had believed in him once but we were only children then. Now we were big boys and we played at school in the big boys' yard, and all that kids' stuff about reindeer and the North Pole had no sense to it. It had none of that logic that Spock always talked about. For example, we had a glass-fronted fire and there was no way Santy Claus could get down our chimney. And even if he did, he'd be well banjaxed.
But we had believed in Santy once and had fervently pinned our notes to his cardboard house at the back of Wellworth's general store: "Dear Santy, bring me a Chopper"; "Dear Santy, bring me a Space Hopper"; "Dear Santy, bring me Lego and an Action Man". But then, I began to wonder, how could Santy be in Wellworth's and be in some other shop as well? That was stupid. And then one year I knew rightly who the Santy was in Wellworth's - it was the woman who usually searched peoples' bags on the way into the shop looking for bombs. And Santy wasn't a woman anyway. I knew that much.
The rest of the Christmas story we accepted completely. The baby Jesus in the stable made perfect sense. In the last few weeks of term we had received the whole story in instalments and it was terrific stuff. A huge tale full of strange words like "bethrothed" and "virgin". The best bit was always the Three Wise Men following the star, and on those dark nights we were watching the skies as well. One night we saw a shooting star behind the barracks and on the same night I saw a UFO hovering over Drumclay.
And King Herod was like Fu Manchu. He was the bad guy and we could hate him and what pleasure in the Flight Into Egypt as they gave evil Herod the slip. The virgin birth meant nothing at all to us - but how did the Three Wise Men know about the star? That was a mystery all right. And all their gold and their myrrh and their Frankenstein - as we called it behind the teacher's back. And how could God become a baby and still be in Heaven with a big beard?
But that was the early 1970s - much has changed since then, and I've given up trying to work these things out. This Christmas I'll be watching Raiders of the Lost Ark one more time and complaining that the footpaths haven't been salted. This Christmas I'll be even crankier than last Christmas: bah humbug and all the rest of it. But that said, maybe I'll meet a few excited children with their new tricycles (if children still ask for such things) and I might even have to pretend I still believe in Santy Claus for the sake of something. After all, every child in the parish has to be greeted with "Well, did Santy come?" And maybe then I'll hear the screams of excited youngsters as they go on their backs on the ice and I'll know they are freezing and sweating and their hearts are thumping. I'll maybe be happy for them because they'll believe in anything at that age and maybe I'll be just a little bit jealous.
On Christmas afternoon, bored with Raiders of the Lost Ark, nostalgia will maybe get the better of me and I might go for a walk and visit a few old haunts. I'll maybe crunch through the potholed asphalt path around the icy Mill Lough, and I might hear the distant shouts of children up on the hill where I used to make those treacherous bob-runs. The only other sound around that silent frozen lough might be the echoing sonar of a cold, bewildered water-hen, nervously out of its element and trying its jittery best to walk on the water.