Christmas Eve: the best day of all

OF course it's not fair, but since I had a happy childhood, I also a whole series of happy Christmas Eves. We had a marvellous old nun at school who said that we should do good deeds and fill our hearts all day with good thoughts so that when Our Lord's birthday came there would be a huge welcome for Him on earth. And it seemed not only very reasonable but also kind of easy. Imagine giving someone a birthday present that only involved thinking nice, cheerful things and being good.

Ordinary humans weren't as easily satisfied when it came to birthdays, I had noticed darkly.

And of course there was Confession on Christmas Eve, with great crowds waiting by the boxes. These were the once-a-year people, we knew that. They had to be able to go to Holy Communion with clear consciences on the Day.

As a once-a-weeker myself I used to look at them disapprovingly. Imagine doing all those sins, 52 weeks of them, and only telling them once. Then I would go in with my prissy, virtuous face and tell my own sins, and make heavy weather out of saying one week since my last Confession, almost at the top of my voice, so that those outside would tremble at my goodness.

And then it would go to the crib and say my penance and feel great.

THERE was always a huge sense of fuss and excitement in our house on Christmas Eve, and much of it centred around the delivery of the turkey. Because we had cousins in the country, they used to send us a bird and it arrived on Christmas Eve by train. Let's put it this way, it didn't really arrive under its own steam. It wasn't waved goodbye at Charleville station or anything. It arrived wrapped in straw and brown paper and strong and with its head still on but very defunct. The guards' vans on trains used to be full of turkeys in those days.

My mother was always over-interested in the insides of things. When the turkey was unwrapped and we all tried to avoid its sad, dead eyes because we knew how much we were going to be enjoying eating the rest of it tomorrow, Mother was there like the State pathologist examining it in minute detail.

Her highest praise was that it was a properly fasted bird.

This meant, I suppose, that it hadn't been given lots of awful gunge to eat which remained in it.

Which was good.

But then sad, too, for the turkey - that it didn't even have a last hearty breakfast before it went for the chop. But life has always been full of these confusing contradictions and I imagine that we got over it then, as now.

Another present also used to arrive on Christmas Eve wrapped in straw, in a fragile, sort of wooden box. This was two bottles of liquor. One was a bottle of sherry, from a real sherry place in Spain and we would often look up Jerez on the map, hardly believing that a bottle had come all the way from there via Charleville to Dalkey.

And the other bottle was whiskey, which had a black label with the words Owen Binchy and Sons" on it, and that was even more exciting to think we were from a family that made our own whiskey!

My uncle hadn't a distillery or anything but like a lot of people with businesses in those days he blended his own brand - which seems amazing now but not nearly so amazing as the fact that this bottle would stand for a year on the desk in our sitting room because nobody drank it. That's what seems very hard to take on board, but truly, there it stood until some was poured on cotton wool for a toothache or for the time when a big visiting dog barked at one of us causing a fainting fit, or if the odd visitor could be persuaded to try a glass.

Now about one year in three, the bottles would arrive smashed to smithereens and a council of war would be held in the kitchen. Would you tell Uncle Owen or would you not? Did politeness mean that you told him they had arrived in great shape or did practicality imply that you wanted him to know there wasn't enough straw or wood around the bottle or that people may have been playing cricket with them in the guard's van?

If you admitted that the bottles had broken, did it look as if you were asking for replacements?

In the end, the truth would be told, as we took the reeking bits of splintered wood and soaked straw out to the dustbin and tried to stop Smokey the cat from prowling around the unfamiliar smell and hurting her soft grey paws. Uncle Owen always said he much preferred to know and in January another parcel would arrive by some other means.

AND the house used to smell terrific all day on Christmas Eve, orange rind and candied peel and the white icing going on top of the marzipan and the old, tired, encrusted-looking cake ornaments being taken out of the box, looking yellow and horrible compared to the lovely clean icing.

Wouldn't holly have been nicer?

Of course it would, but you didn't think like that, not when the old familiar friends - four crumbling reindeer and a chipped-Santa Claus - came out of the box again.

About a week before Christmas another uncle would take us all to lunch and give us a Christmas present of paper money. For years and years it was £5 each and we all spent that on Christmas presents for everyone else. One year it went up to £10, which was beyond anyone's ability to cope. There was even talk of our opening Post Office books. But the next year he had forgotten this sudden hike and it went back to being £5 again which annoyed us all with him deeply.

Much of Christmas Eve was spent rustling in our rooms deciding whether to give the soap to Mother and the 4711 Cologne to Joan or vice versa, and would the glass dish be nicer as an ashtray for father or an ornament for Renie? And would Billy ever wear the woolly gloves which had looked fine at the sale of work but looked a bit poor on Christmas Eve as a gift for your only brother?

And because none of us were much into gift wrapping in those days - more like Clery's paper bags, in fact - we didn't have parcels under the tree, but carefully guarded piles grew in our bedrooms with strict instructions that nobody was to go in to anyone else's room under any pretence whatsoever.

Christmas Eve was always full of anticipation: I honestly don't ever remember any of us being cynical or jaded, or bored or impatient. The day seemed to work its magic on us, and we all say that it still does, in our four different homes, to this day. None of us ever say that Christmas isn't worth the fuss, that it's too commercial and that next year we are going to cut it all out.

Sentimental and nostalgic as I am, I don't want to suggest that we all grew up into our twenties sitting around the house waiting for the properly fasted bird and the hopefully intact liquor to arrive on the train, offering to beat the brandy butter so that we could lick the bowl and trying to secretly examine the presents at the bottom of our parents' wardrobe.

.We grew up and found different ways to enjoy the day. We discovered, each in our own time and in our own way, the joys of Grafton Street, and wandering around Dublin in the lights and the last-minute fuss and delighting in meeting people we hadn't seen for years.

But we always came home early to be part of the excitement, for the setting of the table for breakfast with paper napkins and pointed grapefruit-spoons only taken out once a year. And we never envied anyone else their Christmas Eve because there could be no house anywhere where there was as much activity and hope and a general sense of things going on.

And even the bleak, bad Christmas when our mother died we made the effort. We really did, because we felt we owed it to her. She had run so many good Christmas Eves for us we couldn't back off on this one.

And our eyes met over the turkey which we took immediately to the butchers to find out whether it was adequately fasted or not.

And one of the liquor bottles was broken but I told the lie and rang Charleville to say they had arrived in the best of shape, and we drank the one that hadn't broken between us as we geared up for Christmas Day.

And I remember going to bed that night, and thinking that I would never force my own good cheer on other people at Christmas time because they might be just managing to hang in there like we were.

But on the other hand, I was the daughter of people who enjoyed Christmas Eve so neither would I ever join forces with those who complained, moaned, said it was only for the children or for those who made a money-making racket out of it.

To wake on Christmas Eve, hopeful and full of anticipation, is not the privilege only of the very young, the very religious or the seriously elated.

I believe that a lot of you will have woken that way this morning. May the feeling not diminish for any of us during the day or the week ahead.