OPINION:After a frantic bout of shopping, only a few concrete memories remain of Christmas, writes Ann Marie Hourihane
IN THESE limbo days after Christmas, the event itself, so recently past, becomes increasingly difficult to remember, as if it were a dream.
It is hard to recall that only a few short days ago you were a crazed shopper frantically searching for items of which you had never heard before December 1st, and only a few concrete memories remain.
There's always a Christmas read and this year people have mostly been reading The Suspicions of Mr Whicher. Or perhaps that should be people have mostly been buying The Suspicions of Mr Whicher.
It was sold out in many Dublin bookshops - including Eason's on O'Connell Street - in the days coming up to Christmas. We had to wait to for a special delivery on the day before Christmas Eve before bulk-buying it in the dying minutes of the Christmas shopping hysteria.
This delicate operation required pinpoint co-ordination with bookshop staff via mobile phone, and quite a lot of pre-delivery tension.
Anyway, The Suspicions of Mr Whicherby Kate Summerscale worked out pretty well. You should know that it is a good Christmas read, in case you happen to see it reduced from its pre-Christmas peak of €17.50 for the new paperback version.
Bookshop staff are never so busy that they cannot find time to slap a large euro price tag over the much smaller sterling price which is printed on the cover.
They perform this task with pinpoint accuracy too, and it does tend to weaken your patriotic resolve to support local bookshops in 2009.
However, The Suspicions of Mr Whicheris big, Victorian, blood-soaked and voyeuristic, like all the best detective books. The perfect escape from the festive season. Strangely though, I have spent quite a bit of time reading The Irish Timescalendar for 2009 instead.
I do not wish to appear ungrateful, but The Irish Times calendar for 2009 is terribly small. I mean, it's really small. By my calculations, which were performed with a plastic ruler and my best glasses, each little window representing a day measures barely 2.5cm x 3cm, which is slightly more than one inch squared, in old money.
I reckon that you can hardly fit the word "dentist" into one of the squares - let alone "Dentist, Lisburn Road, Belfast", which is what a lot of us will be writing in there in 2009, as we all head for the Border.
Also, because the calendar is so small even people with very big writing will find it difficult to read their scrawled appointments when they need to read them most - in other words when they are lying down the telephone in another part of the kitchen.
The Irish Timescalendar for 2009 is really designed for sports fans with really good eyesight - it is filled with sporting fixtures and space is consequently limited.
For example, the square representing Sunday, March 29th, is almost entirely taken up by two entries. One is The Irish Times 150-year anniversary, and the other is the fact that summer time begins.
I know we're all going to be terribly busy getting our marching bands together for The Irish Timesparade, but what if some awkward reader has a barbecue to attend, or perhaps a child to pick up from some unfamiliar address?
That reader will be forced to invade Monday, March 30th, and note relevant appointments there, with uncertain results. I'm telling you, this is going to end in tears.
But the cartoons, by Martyn Turner, are excellent.
The most positive reports for anything over Christmas were for the Palestrina Choir at the Pro-Cathedral in Dublin on Christmas Eve.
This was an event so popular that even if you turned up half an hour early for the start of it you discovered that you were actually about one hour late, and had to rely on the kindness of strangers to gain a seat.
Now that midnight Mass has been moved to the early afternoon, and comprehensively ruined in the process, this seems to have been the best event of the Christmas season.
And it saved some posh post-Catholics from piggy-backing on the lovelier Protestant services - to general relief all round, perhaps - although it did mean that they had to travel to the northside.
The best thing on television over Christmas was Gavin Stacey, which is really the best thing on television all year round, although some of us only watch it sporadically. Gavin Stacey is enough to encourage us all to resolve to watch more television in 2009.
All the Sunday papers say that in the new year we must embrace value for money rather than cheese-paring thrift - in other words we must keep consuming at all costs - and Gavin Stacey is very good value indeed.
Never mind. According to The Irish Timescalendar, at least we are safe in the knowledge that the Australian Open tennis event begins on Saturday, January 17th. I for one cannot wait.