Each year, on the first (or sometimes the second) Saturday in December, my family would go to Dublin to do our Christmas shopping. It was a huge day out and we would be up and on the road early, like half of the rest of the population of rural Ireland. The traffic was usually heavy, the weather generally bad, and there was always the anxiety that there might not be any parking spaces left for our red Ford Escort in the Penney’s car park (there was always space). We stuck to Henry St. and Mary St., and the futuristic Ilac Centre, when it opened, traipsing from one crowded shop to the next, seeking out new outfits that we would wear on Christmas Day, and new winter coats for my sister and me, if we hadn’t already got them in one of the drapery shops in Edenderry. We each had lists of Christmas presents we wanted to buy – presents for each other, for our friends and other family members. We’d take a break for tea (Daddy), coffee (Mammy) and cake, and Knickerbocker glories (Antoinette and me) at the Soda Fountain in the Ilac Centre (was there ever a place more fabulous?) and a middle of the day dinner in the cafeteria of one of the department stores.
When I say ‘we’ shopped for this and ‘we’ looked for that, what I really mean, of course, is that Mammy, Antoinette and I did. Daddy’s role in all of this was to facilitate our shopping, first as driver and, once the car was parked, as bag carrier. At first, he’d come into the shops with us, look around, offer his advice on an outfit if we asked. But, as the day wore on, and the number of bags he was lugging in each hand grew, it became more cumbersome for him to come into the shops. With all those bags around his thighs and knees, he simply was too bulky to get around the narrow aisles in between rails of clothes. So, he’d stand outside the front door of the shop, a little to the side, so he wasn’t in anyone’s way, in the December cold, weighed down by all those bags, patiently waiting while the three of us tried on clothes and bought presents and browsed through books or records in overheated shops. At some point, he’d make a trip back to the car to dump all the bags and then return to us to start the process again.
He wasn’t alone. Outside every shop on Henry St. were two or three men like Daddy, all in the same boat, all patiently waiting, bag carriers, while their womenfolk were inside enjoying themselves.
That’s one of my abiding memories of the build-up to Christmas. I don’t remember what we tried on, or what we bought, or what we filled those bags with. That was all just stuff. But I do remember Daddy, patiently and good-naturedly standing in the cold, making sure that we were having a good time. Like always, putting ‘the wimmin’, as he called us, first.
Christmas is my favourite time of the year and I planned to start a series of Christmas blogs on the 1st of December but, like all the best laid plans, I didn’t get around to it. But here I am, finally. Better late than never. Hope you enjoy my Christmas memories and that they trigger some happy memories for you too.
For me, Christmas is all about food. Sourcing the ingredients. Cooking it. Baking it. Presenting it. Giving it away as gifts. And, of course, eating it. So, a lot of my Christmas memories revolve around food and those memories slip to the front of my mind each year as I once again get down to my Christmas food prep.
I’m a traditionalist when it comes to Christmas food, meaning that the foods that fill me with joy are the ones I grew up with and that I watched Mammy and Nana and my auntie’s Cissie and Lillie making from when I could barely see over the top of the kitchen table.
Christmas prep starts for me in the summer. I can’t easily get some of the ingredients I need for my Christmas cake and Christmas puddings in Spain, so I make sure there’s enough space in the suitcase when I’m home in the summer for the mixed peel, currants, and mixed spice that I’ll need. I like to make the cake and puddings in late October or early November, as the earlier you make those boozy fruit confections, the richer they taste come Christmas Day.
For all that I love this early baking, Mammy intensely dislikes it. I look forward to the Saturday in autumn that I devote to Christmas baking; she dreads it and postpones it as long as possible. Some years, she doesn’t even get around to it.
My aunt Cissie (Daddy’s sister) was the baker in our house, making multiple Christmas cakes and puddings for her brothers’ and sisters’ families and for Dr. Hill, for whom she was housekeeper. Cissie died of breast cancer, aged 56, in 1979. And, although I’ve never asked Mammy about it, I guess she just took over all that Christmas baking for her in-laws after that.
On a mid-week night in November, my sister, Mammy and I would go to my Nana’s house in Edenderry. Although we saw her almost every day, mid-week evening visits were rate, so this in itself felt like an out of the ordinary event. Mammy would arrive with her big cream-coloured ceramic mixing bowl, filled with all the ingredients needed to make the Christmas puddings – bags and bags of a variety of dried fruits, breadcrumbs, eggs, spices, a bottle of Guinness and so on. She and Nana would stand at the dining table, side by side, each making their own puddings, while my sister and I helped out by stirring in the ingredients, chopping glacé cherries, or searching through raisins or sultanas for the occasional errant stalk. Two of my aunts and two of my uncles still lived at home (Mammy is the oldest of 11 children), so the house was busy on those evenings.
Mixing the puddings was no mean feat, given the quantities Mammy and Nana were making. I don’t remember how many Nana made, but Mammy definitely made at least one large pudding and usually four or five medium-sized ones, mixing near-industrial quantities of ingredients at once. Once the laborious work of mixing was done, my sister and I (and maybe a teenage aunt or uncle) would get to make a wish while stirring the thick rich mixture. Even as I write this, I can feel the warmth in my Nana’s living room from the turf fire and the spicy smell of all those ingredients mixing together. Finally, they would transfer the mix into heat-resistant bowls, cover them with tinfoil and then tie twine around to secure each lid and to serve as a handle for removing them from the saucepans of boiling water in which they would be steamed over the coming days.
I remember this with nostalgia. Mammy remembers it as a chore, yet another item to tick off the Christmas to-do list. A lot of people were expecting her to make those puddings each year, so I suppose that took a lot of the fun out of it. That was all 30 or 40 years ago and Mammy no longer makes all those puddings, but I think she still feels the residual pressure of it.
This year, I went home to Ireland for a few days in early November. I hadn’t yet made my own puddings or cake. Mammy was bemoaning the fact that she would have to make her puddings soon (she no longer makes a cake) and, in her own words, was ‘dreading it.’ (At this stage, you’re probably asking why she doesn’t simply buy puddings, if making them causes her so much stress. The answer is simple: she knows that no shop-bought pudding tastes as good as the ones she makes). I suggested that we do it together, just like she and Nana used to in the old days.
Unlike Mammy and Nana, who lived only two miles or so from each other, Mammy and I live in different countries. But we have what she and her mother didn’t have – the technology to make our puddings together at a distance. We decided to do it the following weekend. I phoned her on Tuesday to suggest she go through her presses1 to see what ingredients she had in stock and what she needed to buy. I would do the same before doing my regular weekly grocery shop on Tuesday night. On Saturday morning, we would each put what ingredients we needed on our kitchen tables, each make ourselves a cup tea, and set our devices up so we could see each other, ready to start at 12:30.
And that’s what we did. In between weighing the breadcrumbs and butter, beating the eggs, measuring the alcohol (she used Guinness; I tried using brandy for a change), we chatted and got caught up on each other’s lives. We discussed our innovations – since moving to Spain, I now use a wider variety of whatever dried fruits I find in the shop; she has changed her cooking method (tradition, after all, is always evolving). What a delightful late morning we spent with each other. I even called Katie in to stir the mixture and make a wish. We each left our puddings overnight for the flavours to mingle and the next day we cooked them. Here, in southwest Spain and there, in the midlands of Ireland, our puddings are now cooked and sealed and ready for Christmas Day.
Our ingredients may have changed a little, and our mode of communication, but making the Christmas puddings with Mammy brought me right back to all those years in Nana’s house. I suggested we do it again next year and she said she was up for that!
I thought the early starts last week would be much tougher. In fact, they weren’t too bad at all. After almost three months, during which I only occasionally set an alarm and most days didn’t get up until at least 8am, I wasn’t looking forward to not only returning to the Monday to Friday school routine, but also having to get up an hour earlier because of Lily starting a new school.
Like I said before, getting up in the dark is not one of my favourite things. But, as I’ve discovered this week, getting up at 6am has its merits. This week, while Lily got ready for school, I wrote my morning pages, did ten minutes of yoga, and prepped breakfasts and school snacks.
Lily leaving the house at 7:05 to walk to the bus is the perfect opportunity for me to take Lady for her first walk of the day – just a short one, which works out better for me and for her and for the timing of our later, big walk of the morning.
And what did Lily and I (and maybe Lady) discover? Stars! So many stars in the sky at that hour. And the moon. And planets. And the occasional shooting star. What a way to start the day, with a few moments of star gazing.
By the time Lady and I get home after our brief walk, Katie is up and getting ready to catch her bus, forty minutes later.
It’s a new approach to the morning. I doubt I’ll be feeling this positive when the mornings are no longer a pleasant temperature and I have to drag myself out from under my winter duvet.
P.S. One slight fly in the ointment occurred on the second day of school, when the bus simply didn’t turn up. Lily waited and waited and eventually came home again. She’s the only student from Sanlúcar going to that school and she’s the first one to go to that school in at least three years. The bus driver came the first day. A different bus driver, the second day, forgot to drive to Sanlúcar out of habit. So she got the day off school (I wasn’t about to undertake an 80 minute round trip to drive her there.) I phoned the principal, who phoned the bus company, and the bus has arrived promptly every day since.
I remember the phone ringing down the hall. Mammy got up from the kitchen table to answer it. ‘It’s for you,’ she said, coming back to sit down. ‘Someone from Canada.’ I walked down the hall to the table by the hall window and put the receiver to my ear.
‘Hello?’ I said.
‘Huvi?’ came the reply. Frank. Dear Frank. My friend, my teacher, my hunting buddy. One of my primary research participants in Arviat, it was Frank who had taught me to skin and butcher caribou, and to get it right by doing it over and over; Frank who had taught me how to drive a boat amongst pods of beluga whales in the shallow waters close to shore, so he could harpoon them from the bow; Frank who put me on polar bear patrol while he collected the arctic char that had swum into his fishing net; Frank who I spent hours and days with, far inland on our quad bikes, out at sea at first light. He and Martha welcomed me into their home, made me tea, fed me biscuits and bannock, took me out on the land and to their cabin with their daughters. Frank made me laugh and made me think. How at ease I felt in his company.
And now, he was on the phone. He on the tundra, on the western shore of Hudson Bay; I in the Bog of Allen, in the middle of Ireland. And the distance between us seemed vast. Vaster than the Atlantic Ocean, and maritime Canada and the width of Hudson Bay that separated us. All that we talked about with such ease when we were together dissolved now across the expanse.
He asked about the weather and I told him. But what was Irish weather to him? What was the Irish autumn, with leaves changing colour and falling off the trees, the rain and the mud, when he lived in a place with no trees, where autumn meant the ground covered in snow and the sea gradually turning to ice, travel by boat giving way to skidoos. My autumn meant nothing to him and, from this distance, his autumn was starting to dim for me.
I asked what he’d been doing and he told me where he’d been seal hunting the previous day, who he’d gone with and the other hunters he’d met when he was out. I smiled as he spoke. In my mind’s eye, I could see where he’d been and who he’d been with. I had been there with him, and with his brother-in-law Arden, just a few weeks earlier.
He asked what I’d been up to. It was September and in Ireland there was only Gaelic football in the air. How could I tell him about the match I had been to on Sunday? About the crowds, the excitement, how important football was to my life here? Or that the turf was home and there were still a couple of loads to be thrown in the shed. My voice sounded strange in my ears as I tried to talk to him about my life here.
I’d lived in his world and loved it. He was interested in my world, but had no experience of it. The ease we felt in each other’s company was made jagged by the cultural distance that now lay between us.
We continued to speak on the phone occasionally and I got to spend another summer with him a few years later. It’s a few years now since he passed away. I wish I had been better able to bridge that distance when he called.
The girls have been on summer holidays now for about one-fifth of the year. It’s been a glorious summer. Despite some loss – or perhaps because of it, making us realise how fleeting and precious life is – we have had an amazing summer, during which we got to do some incredible things. Twelve hours from now, the new school year starts.
They’re both a little nervous – a new school for Lily, a new class for Katie. They will both have new classmates and new teachers and, in the case of Lily, new subjects that she’s never studied before.
I’m a little nervous too, as I always am at the start of the school year, hoping they will have positive experiences and will enjoy themselves.
They’ve got their bags packed, their clothes ready, and we’re in bed early tonight. The house is going to be very quiet tomorrow!
It’s 10:55pm. This night, fifteen years ago, I was huge and uncomfortable and eight days overdue, thinking to myself ‘Is this baby ever going to arrive?’ It was certainly taking its time. My friend Sinead, whose baby was due the same day as mine, had already given birth seventeen days ago, and here I was, plodding around, looking like a planet with limbs.
Fifteen years later, and here I am, waiting…this time for the coffee cake that she’s requested for her fifteenth birthday tomorrow to come out of the oven. The same cake she’s wanted for her birthday for years.
Little did I know, this time fifteen years ago, that I’d fall so madly in love with the it that turned out to be a she that making her birthday cake long after my bedtime would feel like a blessing rather than a chore.
Arriving into Sanlúcar de Guadiana last night, I was surprised at just how happy I felt to be home. Just a simple feeling of contentment at being back in my own home.
Our seventy-five days in the UK and Ireland were delightful from start to end. I haven’t enjoyed myself so much or for so long on previous holidays. England was a joy and I experienced very strong positive emotions when I was in Ireland, whereas in the past my feelings have often been mixed. Not because Ireland isn’t great and not because my family and friends aren’t great. It was just me and where I was in my life on previous visits home that made me enjoy being in Ireland on holiday but also eager to return to where I had come from. I didn’t feel that way this time. I enjoyed my time there, and had very mixed feelings about leaving, feeling more torn between the two places I call home than I’ve ever felt before.
So, what a surprise to feel the way I did about turning the key in the lock and walking through my front door last night. Like an exhalation…I’m home. My house is looking a bit the worse for wear after lying empty for seventy-five days and it’ll take us a few days to sweep away the cobwebs, get unpacked and feel properly settled in, but that simple uncomplicated sense of being home was there from the moment I opened the door.
Our lovely friends had been in and left some food in the fridge and our neighbour had hung a fresh homemade loaf of bread on the front door. Still, I needed to buy a few odds and ends this morning, so, after breakfast I threw on something not very presentable that I pulled out of my suitcase and went to the two shops in the village. Ten minutes of shopping took me about three quarters of an hour, from all the people I met, the welcome back hugs and kisses I received, the conversations I had comparing Spanish and Irish weather. I felt welcomed home by my adopted village.
And then, the icing on the cake – collecting Lady from her summer villa (with a swimming pool, no less) and taking her home. Now that our scruffy, dusty, hair in her eyes Lady is back, my little home is complete.
Who cares that our two kayaks are still taking up most of the living room and the suitcases are on our bedroom floors? Time enough moving them tomorrow.
So much talking. Our living room filled with family. Oh how we can talk. One conversation, multiple conversations simultaneously. Sometimes quiet intent listening. Sometimes uproarious laughter.
There’s football talk and golf talk. Talk of births and deaths and marriages. There’s politics and the economy and talk of the rising cost of everything from groceries to airport food.
We ask each other about half remembered family stories, piecing them together, sure to forget and likely to have to ask about them again the next time we meet, or the time after that.
The tea flows, and the wine. The plates of ham sandwiches, rhubarb tart, biscuits, cake disappear, and still the talk goes on.
All too soon it’s midnight. The cousins leave, not to be seen for another few weeks or months, having dropped in and lit up our evening.
And still the talk goes on. As we wash up. As we prepare for bed. As we decide to have one more drink. It feels like we won’t ever run out of talk.
I remember I was eight or nine years old. Daddy had dropped Mammy, my little sister and me to the train station, to get the train down to Cork. We were coming here. I was wearing a new summer dress. It was so pretty – a pastel flower pattern. It was my first time to wear it. I’d been saving it for a special occasion and this was it. As we waited for the train, I squatted down and sat on my hunkers on the platform. Not realising that the hem was caught under the heels of my sandals, I stood up again as the train approached. I heard the fabric tear. I was horrified. My gorgeous dress ripped across the back, along the hem. I felt so sad. Something had been done that couldn’t be undone. I wished I could turn the clock back just a few seconds. The next week, my dress was mended, but the line where it had ripped and been restitched remained, visible if you knew what to look for. To an onlooker, it might have seemed like a trifling thing. But I never forgot that dress and that instant when I ripped it.
Me in place 