12.28.06
Posted in Sunday Times Columns at 8:48 pm by Sarah
We’d better stop doing this before someone dies and we can’t,” remarked a dry-witted aunt at my mother’s annual New Year’s Eve dinner 20 years ago. So we did stop doing it.
As children we had enjoyed Christmas rituals in dogmatic fashion. But from that day onward my mother made a practice of breaking the seasonal routines. It didn’t go down well in a house full of temperamental teenagers. What she considered foresight, we regarded as acts of betrayal.
It started out, as all wedges do, thinly enough. First, there was no Christmas tree. My mother decided a branch painted white would look more artistic than a traditional evergreen. So she found a suitable branch, dabbed on some leftover emulsion, and decorated it with scarlet bows and china ornaments.
Like most Irish families, we communicate by remorseless mockery. So as visitors arrived we scornfully pointed out the “Christmas twig”. In an artfully lit shop window it might have worked; leaning against the embossed wallpaper in our sitting room, it made for a rather pathetic sight.
We made it clear what we thought of our mother’s initiative. It didn’t stop her, though. She continued to subvert the traditions my siblings and I zealously invoked. While we rooted out the best china, she extolled the virtues of dishwasher-proof Christmas plates. When I was about 16, she suggested that Santa wasn’t required to visit. We won that round. To this day, adults in the Carey household sit around and shriek each Christmas morning as they tear open gifts marked “From Santy”.
Attempts to expand our diet beyond a turkey and ham failed too. The spiced beef she brought home from the butcher is still referred to as The Spiced Boot.
Eventually my mother found an ally. A couple of years ago, my brother suggested we switch the Christmas dinner to his house. I, a supposedly mature twentysomething, was the chief protester. How could we not sit at the same table in the same places eating food from the same plates and drinking from the same crystal as we did every year? When the sister handling the intensive negotiations finally broke down on the phone, I relented and threw myself into the spirit of things.
The transition worked because the Christmas menu didn’t change. The youngest sister still made the pudding. The middle sister did the bread sauce. I made the caesar salad, and my mother did the gravy. Nobody makes gravy like my mother.
I learnt to deal with the change of venue, but made it a precondition of marriage that Christmases would always be in Enfield. Familiar with the perfection of the gravy to be had in the Royal County, my husband agreed. So you can imagine my horror when my mother announced the ultimate betrayal a month ago.
The brother in America can’t come home this year on account of the new baby. So she’s going there. Then my father reckoned he’d have to go too. The sisters concocted a pre-Christmas shopping trip in New York followed by dinner with her gravy in the brother’s adopted city of Washington DC.
The brother at home got a rush to the head and decided he’d follow the gravy, taking his wife and children too. They only told me that the gravy train was leaving when all the tickets were booked. My jaw dropped. They were all going without me. I was going to have to spend Christmas with the in-laws. In Belfast. Where they say Boxing Day instead of Steeeven’ses Day.
I’m dreading it. Santy will be in America, so no childish surprise in the morning. The in-laws are perfectly nice, of course, but I won’t know what to do. They make weird stuffing involving sausages. They eat dinner in the afternoon instead of at night. Having the Christmas feed late might sound posh, but it’s actually a hangover from the time when cows had to be milked. It was miserable having to work after Christmas dinner, so the habit began of doing the cows first.
I’ll miss our parish mass with the reading of the births and deaths and the mental calculation of the ratio. It’s been 3:1 births to deaths for the past few years in Enfield, you’ll be glad to hear. We get to sneer at the names of the newly christened babies, identifying characters from soap operas and boy bands.
So here I am on Christmas Eve, filled with anxiety instead of anticipation. Then I remember that someone could be dead and it would all be much worse. My dry-witted aunt is perfectly right: someone will die, and then what will Christmas be like? The empty place at the table will consume the whole room. The little job that person so faithfully performed will be done by someone else.
People die and families move on, but Christmas, by virtue of its tradition, is when the void is most felt. One friend whose father died suddenly absconds with her mother to Tenerife. His presence is too sorely missed for them to bear being surrounded by reminders of all the things they did together. The pain is still too raw to attempt to do things differently; they would be blindsided by memories. Instead they’ll come back tanned and refreshed while we’re still recovering from the self-inflicted hangover of gluttony.
Esther Rantzen, the television presenter, recalled last week the first Christmas after her husband Desmond died. She tried to re-create the celebrations he had masterminded. “It was a disaster. My children found it simply underlined our loss. Des should have been there to bellow out a uniquely tuneless Five Gold Rings as he always had. We yearned to have him back.”
Reading this reminded me of an innovation the middle sister insisted upon one year. We called it the New Material Only rule. While the whole family was together, anecdotes that more than two people at the table had heard before were banned. It forced us to develop new lines of conversation and proved a hit. If one of us does shuffle off this mortal coil, our contribution won’t be so badly missed.
And so it is better that my first Christmas without my mother is one when I know she’s coming back. It also means I need to learn how to make gravy. Instead of taking that secret to America, she could be taking it to her grave.
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12.21.06
Posted in Domestic/Relationships at 10:01 pm by Sarah
My mother: “We weren’t ALL at it. It was NOT common practice”.
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Posted in Domestic/Relationships at 3:43 pm by Sarah
I’m only getting round to reading some of the detail.
How DOES Bertie get away with the bare-faced lies he told the Dail? From the IT today
“The tribunal found that Mr Ahern was the main if not the exclusive counter-signatory on the account during the late Haughey period. He told the tribunal that, because of his busy schedule, he sometimes “for administrative convenience” signed blank cheques so they could be used when needed. The tribunal was told he on occasion signed large numbers of cheques, and was once witnessed signing a full book of blank cheques.
The account was administered by an employee of Fianna Fáil, Eileen Foy. When the question of the possible misuse of the account was first raised in the Dáil in 1997, Mr Ahern said it had not been misused.
“I am satisfied, having spoken to the person who administered the account, that it was used for bona fide party purposes, that the cheques were prepared by that person and counter-signed by another senior party member.
“There was no surplus and no misappropriation,” he said. “The account as far as her excellent recollection goes was normally short, not the other way around. I have spoken to her at some length.”
Mr Ahern did not tell the Dáil that the “senior party member” he was referring to was in fact himself. Also Ms Foy, who was well known to Mr Ahern, had great difficulty recalling important facts to do with the account when she was later called before the tribunal.
When Ms Foy was asked about the conversation she’d had with Mr Ahern prior to his statement to the Dáil, and whether she’d said anything to him which might have caused him to refer to her excellent recollection, she said she couldn’t remember.”
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Posted in Feminism at 3:06 pm by Sarah
Some people really are amazing.
This morning’s IT carries a story of a boy from Morocco with a cleft palate that extended right up to his eye. He got an operation for it in Temple Street hospital where Dr. Michael Earley performed it, having met the boy in Morocco where he does lots of free operations for children with cleft palates.
Pat Kenny interviewed a guy who gets computers thrown out by businesses, refurbishes them and sends them to African schools. He’s been there himself and says its amazing training for the school children.
Another guy was on who built two orphanages and a college in Sri Lanka, all funded by the people of Arklow who have donated over €1m. The orphanages are self-sufficient, growing their own food etc.
Puts us to shame…
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Posted in Uncategorized at 2:18 pm by Sarah
Mark your diaries!
A countdown style documentary on the Irish Rich List will feature on RTE 1 telly at 9.30pm on Dec 27th. (Day after Steeeeeven’s’s’s Day. Yours truly will feature as an “authority” on:
- My hero Denis 
- Tony O’Reilly
- Edward Haughey
- Dermot Desmond
- U2
and some others I don’t quite remember.
I did a long interview. Not sure what they’ll include but hopefully my entire contribution doesn’t get edited out 
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Posted in Domestic/Relationships at 10:31 am by Sarah
As damning as his report is, why, even though it was established by the Oireachtas, did they issue their first report in 9 years when the Dail is not in session and just a few days before Christmas?
Also, this line of Bertie’s about HIM changing the law is annoying. SOME people never need a law to behave morally or ethically. Why should we elect people who need a law to make them behave with honour?
Finally, as some people have said, nothing has changed. If the people were truly offended by CJ taking money, then they would have been equally offended by Bertie taking money. But they weren’t.
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12.20.06
Posted in Uncategorized at 6:37 pm by Sarah
Column done in record time and sent in. I can now focus on domestic Christmas tasks.
1. Visit bank and get tip money organised and into envelopes
2. Wrap presents
3. Complete ALL laundry by Friday. There’ll be a ban for the following week, so its if its not in by tomorrow morning, then you don’t get to look for something on Tuesday.
4. Look up mulled wine recipe. I’ve got the ingredients (except the wine) but not sure of amounts.
5. Make that mince tart. I have told the aunts I will officially receive on Saturday afternoon. Salmon is in the fridge, McCambridges brown bread in the freezer. Good supply of sweet stuff needed. Oh I’ve to make soup. Can do that Friday morning.
6. Hair blow dry appointment Friday afternoon
7. Pick outfit for Friday night drinks. If I see any more black I’ll go mad. EVERYONE’s wearing black.
8. Put fresh cover on the pudding. The tin foil got a bit raggedy in the boiling.
9. em, that’s it. Everything is done! I’ll have to pack clothes on Saturday morning and then the car Saturday night and head for the in-laws Sunday morning.
Blog arrangements: I’d say there’ll be nuttin from Friday afternoon until maybe the 28th. I’ll try and post the column up, but for those who can’t bear to wait that long, just check out the ST website and click on Ireland.
I’ll be around tomorrow and Friday, but in the meantime a very happy christmas to everybody.
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Posted in Uncategorized at 4:59 pm by Sarah
oh god. They asked me did I want to download. I said yes. Everything’s different. How do I get the address bar to move under the menu bar? uuuuuuuuuugggh. Hate change. The text is different too. It says it should be easier to read (cleartext) but it looks very different and my eyes haven’t adjusted. uuuuuuuuugh.
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Posted in Domestic/Relationships, Uncategorized at 2:22 pm by Sarah
The first batch were over-done but alright. The second batch were better. But neither batch sealed correctly. It’s all a bit finnicky really. Maybe I’ll make a mince tart with remaining ingredients. Much less work.
Those Lenihans. I don’t know. Does there come a point where their loyalty devalues them? They are decent people but maybe there is a corruption in refusing to the end to condemn Haughey’s actions. Brian Snr spent his life underplaying his fine intellect and playing the supportive buffoon to CJ. Brian Jr has preserved his dignity but you can see how it has rubbed off on Conor. Defend to the end, irrespective. It saddens because I know him and I know he is decent. But surely at some stage, you have to acknowledge. Or at least not do the bloody reading at the funeral. Brian did this. I will NEVER get my head around that.
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12.19.06
Posted in Domestic/Relationships at 2:51 pm by Sarah
ok ok so I was making the pies and listening to the News at One where the wonderful Sean O’Rourke was dealing with the most exciting Moriarty Report. Ben Dunne is on shouting about being called a liar. He is fantastic. Go here. They are bound to put it up soon, and he started about 30 mins into the show.
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