All you ever wanted to know about an Irish Christmas
The Bangkok Post
One of the moral dilemmas of late childhood that everybody worries over is: where do babies come from? In Ireland, 25 years ago, this would be answered with the equally perplexing: why don’t you go and play football.
Bad babies, everybody knew, were Northern Irish Protestants in a previous incarnation, but that’s beside the point.
The dilemma of mid-childhood, of course, was: where does Santa Clause come from? - or “Santy”, as we called him then. There was supposed to be a different Santy for Protestants and Catholics, and if you were unfortunate enough to be born Jewish, then your Santy was likely to go astray somewhere over Iceland. The point is that he must have come from somewhere up there, among the Northern Lights.
He had to fly over Northern Ireland to get to us little Republicans across the border. Santy knew which side his bread was buttered on – Protestant or Catholic – when he came down the chimney. Catholic houses had cribs with all the trimmings – flour-paste snow, tinsel star, shepherds, three kings and the essential Virgin Mary.
Protestants, on the other hand, has cheap plastic Christmas trees bought in Woolworths in Northern Ireland (to bolster the ailing economy), with fairies, for God’s sake, perched on top of them. Little horsy girls called Diana or Pamela, not our sort at all, ritually stuck these fairies up there on Christmas Eve.
Santa, brushing off the soot, would never get it wrong. He would know never to call on a Catholic house before 1.30 a.m. Everybody would still be up drinking hot whiskies and eating mince pies that had spent the entire duration of midnight mass in the oven. Protestants, brought up on Durkheim’s work ethic, went to bed early even at Christmas.
We always left him a good stiff drink to revive him after his cold ride south, since he would have had short shrift with alcohol north of the border. The glass was always drained by morning. By the time he gets as far as Thailand, Santy must be right sozzled on Irish whiskey, not to speak of Russian vodka.
It was definitely taboo to call Christmas anything but Christmas. All this “Xmas” business was something imported from Britain by the BBC, and not to be tolerated. These days, in Bangkok, every time I see that fake X or worse still hear some unsuspecting Thai TEFL graduate from Daytona, Oklahoma come out with “Merry Xmas”, a superior shudder goes down my spine. It’s “Happy Christmas”, “Merry Christmas” or nothing.
Irish children never put out socks at the foot of the bed - pillow cases or, better still, bolster cases. So what did we get at the bottom of our stockings after all this trepidation? There were transfers of the Lone Ranger and Rin-Tin-Tin which wore off by St Stephen’s Day (never Boxing Day), and little puzzles where you had to get the ball bearing into a hole in the clown’s nose. At the toe of the stocking there was a Crunchy bar, a Kit-Kat and a tube of Smarties. Santy had shares in Rowntree Cadbury. There was a plastic whistle down there too which always disappeared by dinnertime.
Snakes and ladders, Ludo, draughts, Cluedo, Monopoly, tiddlywinks – we got the lot eventually. Scalextric, Meccano, Lego, trains that went round and round until the batteries went. Bows and arrows with suckers at the end, guns and caps, guns that sparked, cowboy suits. You knew your number was up when a new pair of trousers or a hand-knitted sweater wrapped in paper appeared at the bottom of the bed. All those Ben Sherman shirts with the button-down collars, and those paisley-patterned cravats!
One Christmas, my sister got Milly Small’s hit single “My Boy Lollipop” which must have interfered with my hormonal system. I heard it recently in some den of iniquity in Pattaya, and instinctively started salivating. After that came the Tremeloes, the Partridge Family and the Monkees’ “Pleasant Valley Sunday”. You could kiss your childhood goodbye.
When all these goodies had been played with and broken, spun on the old mono turntable (with the record arm back for repeat performance), it was time to turn on the telly and to listen to the Pope. The Pope always beamed out his Urbi et Orbe from St Peter’s Square in Rome at around two o’ clock Irish time. It was a time when mothers were getting teary-eyed with sherry over the Brussels sprouts.
After the Pope, we switched over to the BBC to listen to what the Queen had to say for herself. In Ireland the Queen was never missed. Three o’ clock on the dot, there she was in every decent Catholic home, on the black-and-white Philips with Christmas cards perched on top, a lovely woman entirely. It was all for old times’ sakes.
After dinner, stuffed with pudding, we went to the neighbours to see what they’d got from Santy. There were so few Protestants about that we never did find out if there were special toys for them and special ones for us. We had neighbours called Montgomery, distant cousins to the Queen, who were always out riding their horses when we took our postprandial constitutional. Sandra or Mandy or Penny, or whoever she was, got jodhpurs and a riding whip in her Christmas stocking. At least, that was the way my puerile imagination saw it.
I went to bed on Christmas night with the Dandy and Beano annuals and the lovely smell of their new ink and the gum of their bindings. I fell asleep dreaming of the Bash Street Kids, born atheists the lot, with my sister’s “My Boy Lollipop” coming through the bedroom wall for the umpteenth time.
Years later, hitchhiking in southern Turkey, I came across the small town where St Nicholas, Bishop Nicholas, has his first diocese before being abducted to Bari on the boot of Italy by those crusading Italians. His tomb in Turkey was empty, and there was bat shit all over the floor. I knew then that he was well and truly dead, neither Protestant nor Catholic but probably some class of lapsed Morman or a vegetarian Jehovah’s Witness. I sat down on his plundered tomb, among the bat droppings and the rough stones, and unwrapped a little sweet. I finally knew where Santy came from.