I’m relaxed about Christmas.
Really I am.
Inundated with visitors,
and tired children.
The aged parent who
Can’t resist barbed and
Juvenile comments. It was always
Thus, I got it from somewhere
I remarked caustically.The dull
Headache of too much wine
And the noise started before you
Properly wake up in the morning.
Step on a present this year’s
Gift, tomorrow’s bin men will
Collect what Santa left with
About as much understanding.
They care not what they do. Nor
Do I. And the children
Do whatever they care.
I’m relaxed. Insouciant. In celebratory
Mode. In deed anyway.

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.