TASTES LIKE MORE Family traditions are what made his childhood Christmases so special, says chef Liam Tomlin.

A turkey in the bathtub and ham sandwiches after midnight are some of chef Liam Tomlin’s most vivid memories of his childhood in Dublin, where Christmas wasn’t Christmas without family traditions

When I was growing up in Dublin in the sixties and seventies in a family of four children, we didn’t have much spare money for luxuries. It was a case of first up, best dressed. But my parents always made Christmas a special time of the year for all of us.

We knew Christmas was getting closer when the turkey took up residence in the bathtub and crates of bottled Guinness and soft drinks appeared in the garage. Whiskey and big tins of fancy biscuits for visitors appeared in the cupboards, the posh crockery was taken out and dusted off, and our Sunday clothes came out – no matter which day of the week Christmas fell on.

For us kids, Christmas Eve meant a traditional family trip to Rathmines, which in those days was a small village full of posh shops just a few miles from our home. My mother would go to Nolans, the butchers, to buy a bag of cocktail sausages, back bacon and black pudding. Then we were taken to Gerrard’s Patisserie where we were each allowed to select a pastry from the display cabinet. This was possibly the biggest choice of my whole year: millefeuille, chocolate éclair, opera cake, Paris-Brest – deciding which pastry to go for was simply agonising. My mother would buy long sticks of crusty French bread and when we returned home we would feast on these with lashings of butter along with the sausages, crispy bacon and black pudding to go with our French pastries.

The Christmas ham, which had been soaked in a large pot in the garage, would go onto the stove at around six in the evening on Christmas Eve. Later, scrubbed, brushed and dressed in our Sunday best, we would troop off to midnight mass; going out that late always made me feel so grown up. When we returned home, my mother would carve off a chunk of the ham straight from the pot and make sandwiches with mustard and, again, lots of butter, which she served with mugs of sweet tea. To this day, it’s the best sandwich I have ever eaten and remains a tradition in my mother’s home.

Christmas morning was always full of excitement – complete mayhem in our house. Breakfast was a full Irish fry-up with a glass of fresh orange juice. This was the only day of the year we ever had orange juice in our house and, squeezed from a fruit grown in some exotic country a million miles away from Ireland, it felt like a real treat.

My father would then load us into the car and we would visit and swap presents with grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins while my mother, grateful for the peace and quiet, prepared Christmas lunch at home. She would phone just as she was ready to serve it and we would all head back to feast on turkey, glazed ham, sausage stuffing, roast potatoes, overcooked vegetables, pudding, mince pies, custard, fruit and those fancy biscuits. The evening was spent playing cards and, as I got older, there was many a year that I lost my Christmas pocket money around that table. It was always a day I never wanted to end.

Christmas took on new meaning in the eighties. If I wasn’t working, I’d take a train from London to Holyhead and the night ferry to Dublin, joining hundreds of my homesick countrymen. The atmosphere on the ferry was electric. There were drunken choruses of The Pogues’ “Fairytale of New York” and Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”, fuelled by duty-free-priced beer and whiskey, and the sheer joy of getting out of London and heading home.

Christmas Eve would be spent doing last-minute shopping and listening to the buskers on the streets of Dublin city, and then we would head for the various pubs around Grafton Street – Davy Byrnes, Kehoe’s or The Horseshoe Bar at The Shelbourne Hotel – where we shared stories of the past year’s adventures with family, cousins and friends. But I always made sure I was back at my mother’s house in time for the midnight ham sandwich.

After 30 years of living in warmer climates, Christmas still never feels or tastes quite like Christmas in Dublin.

“THIS WAS

THE ONLY DAY OF THE YEAR THAT WE EVER HAD ORANGE JUICE IN OUR HOUSE – IT FELT LIKE A REAL TREAT”