Christmas is a season when we take stock

Christmas is coming – in fact it’s almost here – and the big news is that Santa Claus has, if not now then in the new year, a gift for everyone in the country, a sparkling new government. Well, maybe not that new and not that sparkling but after a lot of huffing and puffing – real or imagined – Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have made their peace with each other and we are once again more or less where we were.

There is, someone said once, nothing new under the sun. At least we have a few days to get used to the inevitable – another step in the long slow boil in the on/off courtship of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, now over a century on the back boiler and gradually making its way into a slow burn of history, a merging if not an amalgamation – as a papal nuncio might contrive it.

For a while there it looked as if a proposal of ‘a Government of the Left’ might be invented at the last minute to add a bit of Christmas sparkle to the dance but it flattered to deceive as those inveterate campaigners unsurprised us all by taking to the floor in the dance, as Mary Lou would say, of Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

The ‘Left Alternative’ was, as everyone knew then and now, just a mere matter of smoke and mirrors. Being there, done that, back to the drawing-board for another five years.

First there is Christmas to get over. Another predictable season, pickled with its own rituals, its own dance – with its long pattern of Ho! Ho! Ho! and the liturgy of loss and luminosity that creeps up on us at Christmastime and takes us unawares. What’s another year? Another counting of the cost of time drifting past us as memories from the past insist on emerging from the shadows to be lovingly mulled over or to be held at arm’s length, to be enjoyed or to be placated.

Memories, especially of Christmas past. For me, a never-to-be-forgotten memory of kneeling in the kitchen at home in Ballycastle on Christmas night saying the Rosary. My father telling the beads as I watched him through the rails of a kitchen chair and longed to be old enough to lead my own decade. And going to Mass on Christmas morning, a liturgy that seemed less important than the rush home to see what Santa Claus delivered.

Or in later Christmases walking through the Christmas shoppers and meeting friends and neighbours savouring the hopeful mysteries of a lived life like the birth of a baby born during the year or grieving the loss of a loved one with the difficult memory of an empty chair to recall what was a loving presence but now an overwhelming absence. Picking our way through the bits and pieces of the present moment to try and put some shape on them, to hug them closely or to hold them at arm’s length.

2024 was the year it was when people fell in love or out of love. When good news of promise brought happy thoughts of hope and expectation that mingled with bad news of that diagnosis that brought people to places they would rather not be. When children came home for the Christmas and when the season was marked by a sense of longing for loved ones as far away as ever in Australia or America. And soon enough the positives and the negatives spill into the perennial post-Christmas diagnosis on how we got over the Christmas.

As 2025, already a quarter century since the turn of the millennium, beckons us to imagine or wonder what delights or nightmares will pickle the coming of another year, we find ourselves wondering (as we do) about how happy we are.

There’s something about the Christmas spirit that seems to underline, even presume an expectation of happiness. This is the one time of the year when people sense that they deserve to be happy and when they’re not, the loss is felt all the sharper.

Maybe there is a sense in which we expect too much. The words ‘Happy Christmas’ are used so often that we begin to imagine that everyone has an automatic right to them. The bouncy music, the flashy ads on television, the bright lights in the shops, the lift that so many get at this time of the year, even the store Santa Claus drumming up a bit of business and the irrepressible Rudolph jingling his bells... all of that carries us on a great sea of expectation.

The reality is, of course, that we will be as happy at Christmas as we are at any other time of year. The only difference is that at Christmas we are more aware of how happy or unhappy we are.

There’s a kind of annual stock-taking that we seem compelled to make as the hours are counted down to Christmas midnight. It’s an examination of where we are and how it’s going, a night when the eyes can fill with tears as the memories flood in and the expectations of other years seem to have come if not to nought at least to less than was expected. And we mull over the remains not just of Christmas but of what we have made of our lives.

Reality is always less than it might be. And at Christmas, we can find ourselves searching through the bits and pieces that make up the lives we have. That’s why so many people buy so many presents on Christmas Eve. That’s why so many who never come near the church for the rest of the year somehow find themselves drifting towards the Church on Christmas night for an annual visit. That’s why so many say that they resent, even hate Christmas.

Wherever you are and whatever space you’re in, can I wish all my readers the happiness you wish yourself this Christmas time.