Rich in rituals

Your children will remember family Christmas traditions long after they have forgotten the gifts they received, writes SHEILA WAYMAN

OF ALL the senses, none can transport you back in time like the sense of smell – and never more so than at Christmas.

One whiff of fresh pine and I am back in the drawing room of Dunsink Observatory in north Dublin where I grew up, a week before Christmas, impatiently waiting to decorate the tree – as soon as my frustrated father finds out which is the broken bulb preventing all the other lights from working.

We three children have already witnessed the palaver of erecting the tree in a large brass bucket filled with soil, tilting it one way and then the other in an effort to be able to pronounce it “straight”.

The choir of King’s College, Cambridge is singing carols on the record player and slightly damp coal sizzles in the large fireplace. There is a pungent scent from the tangerines we are wrapping in coloured foil to hang on the tree, along with our mish-mash of decorations.

As an Englishman abroad, my father initially stuck to some of his own traditions, until the effect of living in Ireland began to seep in. In the early years we faithfully sat down in front of the television to hear Queen Elizabeth’s speech – but it got to a point where it was impossible to get through church, the annual drinks party at the doctor’s house and Christmas dinner, before Liz started intoning “My husband and I . . .” Cutting the queen’s speech out of our Christmas rituals was undoubtedly a turning point in the “Irishisation” of our family.

I have always loved Christmas and as a child wanted the build-up, the day itself and the lazy aftermath to be exactly the same each year. As a parent, when the temptation can be to rush around needlessly and take short cuts, I have to remind myself that these special days are all about making my children’s future memories.

“Routine and rituals are the stuff of childhood and Christmas is the time for those special rituals,” says Irene Gunning, chief executive officer of the Irish Preschool Play Association. “These rituals will be remembered when the toy of the year is forgotten, because they will be lived and carried out and go on into the family.”

Everybody inherits Christmas traditions – but you can start your own rituals with your own family. A couple can share memories and create new ones with their children.

“That is the beauty of it,” she says. “Every family can have its own little quirk or nuance to it and then that helps that family have that identity.”

As a grandmother, Gunning knows how gratifying it is when your children grow up and still want to come home and do these things. “They are the smallest things, but they have developed a meaning and an identity. I don’t think we should underestimate the power of these little rituals.”

As we hurtle towards Christmas 2009, she advises parents to: “Relax and stop rushing around. Having a wonderful time automatically creates those wonderful pools of memories.”

Gunning, who grew up in Heytesbury Street in Dublin 8, recalls how: “Christmas for us started when our mother used to take the tin box out in September and she would help us save our money to buy presents. I just loved that. I used to go down to Woolworths in Grafton Street for gifts that we could afford with money that we had saved.”

It is a practice she recommends to parents today, when Christmas for children tends to be so much about, “What am I getting?” Help make them responsible for giving, too.

Gunning found herself re-enacting rituals with her own three children. She never liked putting up the Christmas tree too soon, because as a child she was used to it going up just a few days before Christmas.

“I have lost that battle with my daughter,” she says with a laugh. Denise, who is married to an Englishman and lives in Cambridge with their two young children, had sent her mother pictures of their tree by December 2nd.

However, tree apart, Gunning finds it “amazing” that Denise goes about Christmas in an almost identical way to herself, accommodating a few of her husband’s traditions.

“She is so caught up in all of her little rituals of Christmas, she feels it is very important to embrace her husband’s as well,” says Gunning, who will be going over to spend this Christmas with them. For instance, there was the dilemma of did Santa’s gifts go under the tree, as Denise would have grown up with, or at the end of the bed as happened in her husband’s house?

“I think she has compromised. Santa’s gift goes under the tree, but there are stockings at the end of the bed. That is how new traditions are born.”

Heidi Giles is keen to merge Irish and German customs for her two young children, three-year-old Rosie and two-year-old Billy, in their Co Kerry home. They are fortunate in having two great-grandparents still alive, Erich (77) and Else (78) Schiller, who emigrated here from Germany in the 1950s and now live in east Cork.

She asked Else, an accomplished crafter, to make Christmas stockings for her children with their names on them. “I am delighted that they will always have them and that they will be a link with their great grandparents, who they are so lucky to have.”

Heidi recalls how, growing up in Bandon, she and her two younger brothers always went to their mother’s parents’ house on Christmas Eve for the big traditional German celebrations – and then they would have Christmas all over again the following day, Irish style, with their father’s side of the family.

In the run-up to Christmas, they had the Adventkranz at home, a wreath with four candles to be lit for each Sunday of Advent. “I will too, but my children are just too young for it – candles and toddlers are incompatible!”

Advent is a much bigger thing in Germany, she explains, and she remembers her mother baking in the evenings, making five or six varieties of biscuits. Heidi’s favourite were Kipferl, little moon-shaped vanilla biscuits that she is making herself this year.

“You would eat the biscuits through Advent when people would call. The whole of December is much more celebrated in Germany, so I would be bringing that to the kids,” says Heidi, who lives with her husband, Daniel, in Tralee and earlier this year started the homemakers’ website, www.clean sheets.ie.

Like many young married couples, they still alternate their Christmas Days between their parents. “Even in the years we’re in Tralee, I cheat and we go back to east Cork for Christmas Eve,” she says. They drive home at about 10pm with the children asleep in the back in their pyjamas.

It is early days to be starting traditions for their own children, but one they are establishing is to commemorate Daniel’s brother, Garry, who died of leukaemia on December 8th nine years ago, at the age of 32.

“He is obviously very abstract for our kids, but we want them to be aware of him. So we have decided to put up our Christmas decorations on December 8th every year,” she explains. “It brings Garry into our home.”

Not everybody is intent on reliving family traditions. Writer Kate Thompson admits she now falls into the “bah humbug” camp – despite very happy childhood memories of Christmas. About 10 years ago, she and her husband, actor Malcolm Douglas, “started running away from Ireland” with their daughter, Clara, at this time of year.

It was a decision sparked by a particularly stressful December 25th, when she had her mother-in-law staying and they also had a drinks party in the house from 3pm-5pm, “but this being Ireland, loads of people rolled up around half past four. After that, we had to get the food on the table and we just realised it was extremely hard work – so the next Christmas we all went off to Jamaica!”

They had learned to scuba-dive before they left and had a “brilliant” time. Since then diving holidays have been their preferred way of spending Christmas – “if we can’t get away somewhere foreign, we go to Connemara” , explains Thompson, a former actress, whose latest novel, The O’Hara Affair, will be published in January.

This year they will be with Malcolm’s family in Worcester, while Clara (22) will be with her Australian boyfriend in Perth, where she is on a one-year’s working visa. It is a reminder that you can only take spending Christmas with your children for granted for a finite number of years.

Update your traditions: be festive with the internet and webcam

A very 21st century tradition, which Darina Loakman started with her three sons, is logging onto an internet website to track the progress of Santa as he travels across the world on Christmas Eve.

They watch him start his deliveries in the South Pacific and go on to New Zealand and Australia. By the time he and his reindeer reach Russia, 11-year-old Brian, nine-year-old Harry and six-year-old Osgar know it is time to be in their beds at home in Sandycove, Co Dublin.

It is, believe it or not, a joint US-Canada military operation which tracks Santa on the website, www.noradsanta.org, "using radar, satellites and fighter jets".

The North American Aerospace Defense Command has been keeping tabs on Santa every Christmas Eve for more than 50 years, all thanks to a mistake in a newspaper advertisement in 1955.

The advert was encouraging the children of Colorado Springs to telephone Santa, but there was a misprint in the number and the youngsters instead found themselves straight through to the "hotline" of the air defence's commander-in-chief. The director of operations, entering into the spirit of the season, asked his staff to check their radar for signs of Santa leaving the North Pole and updates were relayed to the young callers.

So a tradition was born – one that now, thanks to the internet, is enjoyed all over the world. It is no surprise that this appealed to the web-savvy Loakman, a proponent of online working for women at home and founder of the www.iamawahm.com website.

Technology will play a part in bringing David Caren's family together this Christmas. A Dubliner who married a Cork woman, he now lives in Innishannon, Co Cork, with Ellen and their three young children, three-year-old Robin, two-year-old Astrid and baby Dalton.

"It is a big family day for us, in Cork or Dublin, and what we normally do is rotate it. This year we are down in Cork," says David, a stay-at-home father who runs the www.dad.ie website.

As a child, his extended family always congregated after Mass on Christmas morning in his auntie's house, just around the corner from their own home in Blanchardstown. Likewise, he is intent on bringing family together in Cork, but it is harder now they are scattered.

His parents have recently got a laptop computer and webcam, so they will be able to see and talk to their grandchildren on Christmas Day. Likewise, Robin will be able to share Christmas greetings through Skype with her cousin Laura in Madeira.

"My mother retired this year and went off and did computer classes with this in mind," explains David. "My wife's mother, who is in her 70s, did a similar thing in Cork. It is fascinating – the grannies looking through the webcam!"

Documenting the Christmas memories

Annamarie Redmond's three children won't have to depend solely on their memories to evoke past Christmases as she captures the events and mood of the moment through photos and comments in scrapbooks for each of them.

"I'm big into Christmas," she says. As the eldest of three children, she was always the one who decorated their home in Glasnevin, north Dublin. When she and her husband, Alan O'Byrne, moved into their own house in Drogheda, Co Louth, one of the first things she bought were Christmas decorations.

Since the birth of their children, she makes a point of taking photographs in the run-up and on the day itself to tell the story of that particular Christmas. "It is really just to remember how they felt about it," she explains. Annamarie tries to record an individual activity for each child – last year it was baking with Mia, now aged five, while nine-year-old Alex had a Christmas carol service and seven-year-old Callum was in a play.

Always one for hoarding memorabilia in boxes, Annamarie stumbled across scrapbooking as a craft on the internet in 2005. "I could not imagine what somebody could tell me about keeping a scrapbook," she says. "Then I found all these beautiful papers, stickers and sparkly things that I can make my books with, and I was hooked. It is like painting a picture, a really nice way to embellish your photos." What started as a hobby is now also a part-time business as she runs TheScrapbookStore.ie, supplying materials, and she conducts workshops.

Another ritual that she has started with her own children in the run-up to Christmas is making gingerbread cookies.

"Being a scrapbooker, I take photos of the children in their little aprons – to prove to them when they're older that I have actually done all these things!"

She passionately believes in the value of documenting the memories in this way. "I think it does help you. It is lovely to hear stories about yourself as a child. It makes you think about the type of person you were and how you have changed over the years."

She incorporates her own comments about how she feels about the children, "so they know how proud you are and can look back at that".

In her childhood, her family would spend much of Christmas Day visiting extended family and neighbours while their mother remained in the house to cook the dinner and receive visitors. In contrast, Christmas Eve was a time for all of them to stay at home – a tradition which she and Alan continue.

"That's kind of sacred, you don't go anywhere," she explains. They have a nice dinner together, then "it's all about stories" in front of the fire.

For the past two years, the children have gone outside in their pyjamas to sprinkle reindeer food on the lawn. "It is oatmeal mixed with glitter and sugar," she explains. "It shimmers in the night and the idea is that the reindeer will see it when they are in the sky."

After the children have gone to bed, Annamarie loves the peace of Christmas Eve and the chance "to sit and anticipate what's coming".