‘COME AND SEE WHAT THE LOWER CLASSES DO AT CHRISTMAS’
‘Come and see what the lower classes do at Christmas’. That was what the Posh Sister told her Posh Husband during a visit to my not-posh house at the weekend. She would have taken a picture, if she had a smart phone, but she hasn’t got one of them because they are not ‘environmentally sustainable’. She’s not ‘entirely stable’ more like.
Just when you thought the build-up to the Christmas season couldn’t get any more fraught, the Posh Sister rings me on Saturday morning. From her like 15-year-old Nokia which the Ma had told me she lost. A bit like that big long poem we did in Leaving Cert English by John Milton, it was Paradise Regained after she found it. The Posh Sister did without a phone for a week and apparently got by quite well. She found it just in time to ring me and tell me she and the Posh ones were on their way to Dundalk and wanted to ‘call in for half an hour’.
It wasn’t so bad. I had to get out of the jammies in the afternoon anyway as the Wee Lad had been invited to a birthday party so I would have been putting clothes on in any case. The fact the Posh Sister was arriving too meant I had to do the make-up and hair when I was at it.
If you don’t have the make-up and hair done, the Posh Sister is known to launch herself into a monologue about how washed out you’re looking, how smoking is taking its toll and would you not give it up, that you’re not eating properly and smoking is killing you, the hair’s in a desperate state, most likely because of the fags too . . . so it’s easier just to spend the ten minutes whacking the war paint on to avoid that particular battle.
Their car was pulling up just as the Wee Lad and I were approaching the house after he was collected from his party. From one session of excitement, he was straight into another, running off to play with the Tiny Lad.
But not before the Tiny Lad stopped dead in his tracks to stare wide-mouthed and sparkly-eyed at my impressive Christmas tree, which, in fairness, has everything going for it including two sets of coloured flashing lights, candy canes, gold tinsel and more balls than you’d get at a training session in Oriel Park.
‘Do you like your Auntie Annie’s Christmas tree?’ I asked. ‘Y...y...es’, he replied, hesitant I think because he knows at nearly six he’s probably meant to have more taste. I went back to the kitchen where the Posh Sister and the Husband were looking in the cupboards for ‘green tea’ or ‘chai lattes’ or something. ‘Yeah, no, I’m just out of that. The Wee Lad drank the last one. Will you take a drop of the Punjana?’ I said.
The looked at each other and decided to jump into the appalling beverage situation together. You have to admire their commitment to each other. And it was while sipping Punjana tea out of my chipped mugs, the Posh Sister spied the reflection of the flashing Christmas tree lights on the door.
‘Good grief ’, she said, grateful for the opportunity to put her cup of ‘swill’ down and walking briskly to the livingroom, leaving the Posh Husband to put the tay down the sink, ‘is that an ambulance going past or, my God, have you the Christmas tree up already?’
She had already marched into the room and was staring, google-eyed, at it in all it’s chintzy glory. ‘Come here’, she says to the Husband. ‘Seriously, you have to see this. This is what the lower classes do. Put up the Christmas tree at the start of December and decorate it with, well, what is that?’
Tinsel, it’s tinsel ya mad yolk ya. I called her Tiny Lad and handed him down a candy cane which he opened and started guzzling with impressive speed before she could start going on about refined sugars, again. She could haver taken a picture of my tree, but she has no smart phone, thank God, because that snap would have been doing the rounds in South Dublin from now until, well, Christmas.