Today parents packed the hall
To see their children perform
In the Christmas Play.
It was innocent and heart
Warming, and wonderful
And what Christmas should be about.
Meanwhile three hundred yards
Away in a mangy
Derelict hotel bought
By developers who couldn’t afford
To develop, a young life
Expires prematurely and alone.
Was it the cold made him
Seek refuge in a disused hotel.
Or was he turned away,
No room at the inn? This time
The play had no happy ending.
Just the opposite
Of Nativity and with it
The Christmas lights went out.

It’s early December so that means that the newspapers are full of the usual shite coming up to Christmas. Inevitably, like the shops pumping out I Wish it Would Be Christmas Every Day, there is nothing really new in any of this.

I always love to read the broadsheet supplement guide to Christmas presents. For Her. For Him. For a Teenage Daughter. For a Son. For a Spoilt Brat. For a Toddler. For the Dog. For Your Spinster Friend Who’s Desperate at this Stage. For fucks sake.

The Daily Telegraph are usually the best, reflecting their blue nose readership. It’s great to know that some pinstriped gel-haired City trader can dress his chick in a bra and knickers the value of which would bankroll an entire child’s Santa wish list. I hope he gets the present he thinks he deserves.

Ah yes, Tory grandees eating cured ham with truffle shavings and some sort of oil strained off the cleavage of a Polynesian Islander. Washed down with a lively red recommended by the former Sommelier at the Garrick. Their wives get some sort of exquisitely contrived ornament that will last until the boisterous family labrador jumps after one of the treats it has been bought and smashes it into smithereens. Do Dogs Know Its Christmas Time?

Why the Daily Telegraph you ask. Well, I like to know how the other half lives you see. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer and all that. The Observer. The Sunday Times. The Guardian. They all have them. The Telegraph takes the biscuit for the ridiculous prices it casually suggests for a stocking filler.

Whether it’s the Irish Times telling us the country’s fucked and we should all hit some Country market in Ferbane or Bansha to pick up authentic produce at a steal or the Gear section of the Sunday Times recommending boy gadgets that make life no easier. Overly precocious frocks for youngsters costing hundreds of Euro. Wooden hand made trains and coloured numbers costing €60 or €70 that I know our ones would trash in a matter of minutes. If you miss the supplements you can watch it on the Late Late show. Sadly I was too late for that.

Still, I love reading about presents that I neither want nor that I will ever get. Nor will I ever buy them for anyone else. That’s Christmas just the way I like it. Remote control airplanes to fly round your office. Desk snooker. Robotic desk organisers. iPhone holders so you can watch movies on your tiny screen and ignore the forty inch behemoth in your living room. An inflatable shark you can steer. Just what we need in this place. I can just imagine what my life would be like with all that shite in situ.

The other feature piece that gets a run out is the Christmas Party. It’s usually either warnings about behaviour when under the influence, regrets, disciplinary consequences; how to run a good party or how much the feature writer hates this time of the year.

Today in the Irish Times Maeve Higgins has a curmudgeonly piece about how she hates parties at Christmas time. From the sounds of things she’s been to plenty. She complains about the food. The drink. About Cocktail sausages. WTF like? About the sorts of bores she meets. God help them meeting this miserable bitch is all I can say. I hear Saudi’s good this time of year Maeve.

Papers will often troop out that old chestnut about misbehaving at the Christmas party. Indeed. Having worked in a large institution for years with plenty of Festive Drinking and its fair share of debauched people, I don’t recall any of the goings on that apparently break out at parties across the country. Middle aged couples sherried up playing footsie under the table while the young account exec pleasures her boss in beside the photocopier like something out of Mad Men.

Meanwhile the office malcontent is boozed up on cheap party wine and chooses to tell his smarmy boss she looks like she’s in need of a good seeing to. Cue disciplinary hearings galore.

For those that enjoy a bit of harmless fun, the girls are boogying away to the usual  toons, the lads join them and everyone retires to the pub for injury time craic, and to talk about the boring miserable bitch that was there watching the whole thing to write about it for the weekend supplement.

Get a life. Or get a supplement to read about the life everyone else is having without you.

Last year at a coaching conference the then national hurling Co-ordinator Paudie Butler spoke about communication with young children. Try to put yourself inside the mind of an eight, ten or twelve year old child he said, and consider what’s going through their head.

“I beat Mum at Mario Kart, my lace is undone, the ball is coming towards me, I’m gonna kick it, there’s Micky squirting water over James I wanna do that, I don’t like the coach he’s always shouting at me, I’m hungry, Joe I have to go to the toilet, can you tie my laces, my mum says I can’t come next week, we had sausages for dinner….”

He gave a brilliant elucidation of the simplicity of a child’s thinking. Something those of us involved with children or indeed those of us who are making a shockingly inadequate job of raising them fail to understand. It was a salutary tale.

I thought of it a lot recently for a number of reasons. Put yourself in the mind of the other person. God knows what they’re thinking at times. Take Peter. Going to bed tonight he started to cry. He had come last in all his time trials at swimming he told me.

“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”

Paradise Lost, John Milton

I tried to explain that he probably hadn’t come last, and if had, big deal. That there were a large number in his swimming age group. He was having none of it. I reached then for the hoary old chestniut. That is defeating his argument by proving that he is better at swimming than me. And he is, there’s no doubt about that. Eventually the mood lightened.

I also pointed out to him that our main concern in this part of the world is that he can swim so that he can enjoy the sea, and also more importantly that if he ever has to swim for it, that he is equipped to do so. That raised further questions that I batted for touch.

Having a child’s unflappable conviction that his dad is better at everything than him, he argued that I was in fact a good swimmer.  I replied firmly and with conviction that I was not. He wouldn’t accept that. The conversation ended with Peter in laughter when I told him I was good at the doggy paddle.

What is the point of this? Well, I wasn’t aware of what was bothering him when the exchange started. To me it wasn’t a big deal but to him it was. When I looked at it from his point of view I was able to understand where he was coming from.

“Dear incomprehension, it’s thanks to you I’ll be myself, in the end.”

The Unnamable, Samuel Beckett

Paudie Butler was right about putting yourself inside the mind of other people. It is something that applies in everyday life dealing with adults, husbands, wives, work colleagues. If you stop and think of how what you said, didn’t say or did can effect others. Not a bad way to go. And I was telling the truth. I am a shite swimmer.

Iggle Piggle you think? Not in our house he's not. He's Mickey from Strabane and he's on the dole.

I lie to my children.

There, I’ve said it. What a shocking admission. This morning I brought Cáit to the doctor. Her blocked up sinuses were concerning her mother and causing Cáit at times to talk as if she had a clothes peg on her nose. More importantly it was causing pain.

On the way down I told her the remedy was a Schnozzlectomy. I had in mind a procedure where some sort of Dyson designed contraption would be inserted up her nose and the gunge and stuff removed.

Cáit of course didn’t believe a word of it. Not since I told her there was an elephant in a field up the road when she was wee. She doesn’t believe me. There was in fact an elephant one day in afield belonging to a zoo and it licked Leo’s food, snot and gunge covered bib. But no, she does not believe me.

In the surgery, I pointed to the blood pressure machine and told her that was the apparatus for the Schnozzlectomy but she didn’t believe me. Then when Dr James started up his printer to print the prescription I told her that was the other Schnozzlectomy machine. “No daddy, that’s his printer.”

When we were leaving she asked me what adenoids were. I told her they were little people that lived in her nose that shovelled bogies out of the way much as we would do with deep snow. She didn’t believe a word of it.

I then told her about the red ball bouncing up the street this morning. For some reason she did believe that, even though it is thoroughly unbelievable. I took her over to the house where it got stuck and it was still there.  Maybe that’s where the adenoids live.

But my lying has got me into bother. Treasa and Sorcha won’t let Angela read their story at bedtime. That is because I have been making up fantastical stories of late which have become so successful that they want more every night. This involves looking at the pictures in their books but telling a totally different story. Last week in a nativity book we made up a C & W song with a catchy chorus to sing every time the Stable appeared in the story. I even produced the geetar:

“In the Stable, In the Stable,

Jesus was born in the Stable,

With the donkeys and the rabbits…” etc.

It’s the Christmas #1 in our house.

Last night I was presented with In the Night Garden and told to “read your own story daddy.” So, one of the new characters – based on the creature formerly known as Iggle Piggle with his comfie blanket – is Mickey from Strabane who is on the Dole and is travelling up the Foyle to Derry to see about getting a job. Sorcha argued with me that he should be from Omagh but I explained that Strabane is the unemployment blackspot, not Omagh, sadly not a lie for once.

The rest of the story featured lies, lies and more lies. Occasionally in the past I’ve been badly caught out, because as with all lies, one leads to another. I told Peter that Japan had won a football match something like 79 – 0. He went and looked it up in some book with Leo and they immediately started quizzing me on the detail. The problems started when I couldn’t remember the name of the top scorer that I’d created.

Lying to your children. It’s compulsive. Great craic. Addictive. I’d highly recommend it. Particularly to Angela – then she could have the night shift back. Mickey from Strabane is a great fella altogether.