Christmas begins with…
Donal O’donoghue imagines a Christmas childhood
Christmas begins, some say (mainly us), with the RTÉ Guide. is is demonstrably untrue. Others will argue that Christmas begins with the Late Late Toy Show. Again false. As for December 8th? Are you having a laugh? Christmas, as anyone with a jot of sense knows, begins at the end of August when children everywhere discover that school is still a thing. Amid the feverish activity and the fear, parents distract their kids, and themselves, by dangling the vision of the advent of Advent. ‘Doesn’t it only happen once a year?’ they’d say and they’re o to the races long before it’s decent.
It wasn’t like that in my day. Christmas began on December 24 when we’d set about making decorations from old newspapers and used aluminum foil. at would be followed by a nocturnal jaunt to the nearby elds, armed with a large bread knife, to ‘borrow’ a r tree from the neighbour. And while we were at it, shure why not a few branches of holly and perhaps the odd turkey that might be wandering aimlessly about. us laden, we retired to our holding to tuck into dry biscuits and a slice of marzipan before walking ten miles (at least) to midnight mass and confession.
ose were the good old days and it was all great gas until the guards showed up. Or maybe I’m remembering it all wrong. But there was certainly TV and the RTÉ Guide or sometimes no TV so we just ‘watched’ the RTÉ Guide, which was a bit of a problem with 20 siblings and no remote control to change the pages. So instead, we all tore o a page and had to make do with that. e short straw was getting the listings pages which kept repeating on you. And there’s only so many times you can read of Jimmy Stewart and his wonderful life before you start praying that angel never gets its wings.
Of course, we used to believe in angels back then. And the other fellow too, Gay Byrne. Didn’t he have all the toys in his house? And since we couldn’t a ord the stamps, we’d shout our lists for presents up the bedroom chimney to Santa. Sometimes Santa would shout back, telling us to get into bed. And we’d tell him that bad words wouldn’t get him anywhere and we’d be telling the real Santa, Gay, about him too.
And so, Christmas ended with those pages of the RTÉ Guide being used to wrap the festive baubles and the TV being repossessed. “Only 20 sleeps to Christmas,” said the brother who was an insomniac. And we’d start sharpening our knives, thinking that as it only came once a year, we’d better make the most of it. But that was then. ‘Sure isn’t it Christmas every day now’ as my mother might say, prompting us to enquire a er our pressies. “Ask Gay,” she’d say, so we did.