I’m getting in the groove here by binge-watching Christmas movies on Netflix. Last night it was Home Alone in preparation for minding the youngest of my three grandchildren this weekend while his mammy and daddy escape for two nights to a festive wedding down the coast in Co Clare.
Baby Austin will reach his first birthday in mid-January and is at the wrecking-ball stage. He’s crawling with the alacrity of a US Navy Seal and shimmying like spiderman towards the stairs and the adventures those steps offer – so it is essential for me to be mentally and physically prepared.
To be fair to his mammy, Saoirse, she did express trepidation when I sent her a picture of my Christmas tree. It stands in the corner of the living room resplendent with four decades of baubles and bells, tinsel and garlands, felt characters and twinkling lights, which have enough settings to cause a psychedelic neurological event.
“You do know, he’ll go straight for the tree, Mammy,” she warned during a phone conversation last week.
Drum role: Alison Healy casts an incredulous eye over a much-loved Christmas carol
Kindred spirit: Áine Ryan on the joys of reliving a Christmas childhood through her grandchildren
The woman who enchanted Proust – Frank McNally on the rise and fall of Gladys Marlborough
‘He never said that’: Frank McNally is tired of hearing a phantom WB Yeats quote
“It will be fine,” I replied. “I’ve been doing lots of squats and lunges.”
After all, I’ve got skin in the game of being an in-charge Gaggy Áine. It is a role I have been taking seriously now for six years: since my eldest grandchild Ada was born in the middle of the pandemic and her younger sister, Ellen, followed two years later.
As we grandparents know only too well, the second-generational shot at being maternal and paternal brings lots of dividends, especially all those hugs and dribbly kisses.
We don’t have to endure the actual stresses which are deeply etched on the faces of our offspring. Their frenetic schedules involve survival on the careering carousel that is contemporary parenting.
Frankly, it has never been hard for me to create a cocktail of magic. My inner-child is alive and well and ready to be stone-mad at the drop of a hat.
From an early age, my late father, George, stoked that propensity with particular panache at Christmas. On Christmas Eve, he rang little bells outside our bedroom windows in the dead of night. I will never forget the year we found tufts of Santa’s beard stuck on the antique fireguard in our parlour.
And, of course, our parents always left a trail of Christmas cake crumbs on our kitchen table with Rudolph’s teeth marks clear to be seen in the stub of the carrot that was left for him.
Over a half-century later, my two older grandchildren Ada (6) and Ellen (4) are up to their oxters at dawn following the mischievous Elf on the Shelf around their house in Bandon, Co Cork.
They could not believe it last Friday when they found him in their bathroom sink up to his own skinny oxters in Kelloggs Rice Krispies Multigrain Shapes.
This was before they even got out of their pyjamas and brushed their teeth for school and playschool. Indeed, they still had to check their Advent calendar and practise their carols for their Christmas concerts.
Their mammy, Aisling, is a busy teacher who commutes across to the other side of Cork city to work. Whilst in the quiet respite of the car she sometimes reflects on her Christmases on the Co Mayo island where she grew up.
[ Christmas is about pretending for the sake of those we love. It’s magicOpens in new window ]
When she was a small girl back in the 1980s, the magic and mystery was illuminated still by the flicker of candlelight. The hay in the crib on the altar of the little church beside her primary school had been cut with a scythe, cocked and reeked as part of a seasonal pattern, which reached back across the generations of her paternal forebears.
Her granny, Katie Ann, boiled puddings on the range and pickled Christmas cakes with whiskey. She was often on first-name terms with the bird she plucked and gutted, filling its orifices with a potato stuffing. It was particularly delicious after a few sups of the crathur and a long night of card-playing.
“Ochón, ochón” as Peig Sayers might opine, “they were different times.”
As my little grandson experiences his very first Christmas, he is oblivious to the fact that its narrative has utterly changed over the last 50 years.
The symbolic message of new light and rebirth has become lost with the festive period increasingly defined by mass consumerism. Bizarrely, the quest for its magic and mystery is purchased online and in mazes of retail outlets.
Fortunately for me, becoming an adult has never occluded my ability to spy Santa and his reindeers crossing the sky. Neither do I need mulled wine and mince pies to hear him landing on my roof. Although I may well need therapy after a weekend minding baby Austin.
