Life

Nuala McCann: Crises in the mouth of Christmas – yet what can we do but dance?

Ma planted our little tree in the garden. Every Christmas, someone had to go outside and carefully dig it up, evict the worms, pot it and bring it inside for the festive season.

Nuala McCann

Nuala McCann

Nuala McCann is an Irish News columnist and writes a weekly radio review.

No gift wrapping for the sake of sustainability is a beezer of an idea – wrapping presents was always the bane of my life
No gift wrapping for the sake of sustainability is a beezer of an idea – wrapping presents was always the bane of my life No gift wrapping for the sake of sustainability is a beezer of an idea – wrapping presents was always the bane of my life

AS I pen this, the future – post the election – is unclear. Marley’s ghost is hovering at my elbow. He isn’t pretty. All I know is Christmas is on the horizon and our ship seems decidedly rocky.

But let’s be positive... the buzzword this year is sustainable Christmas. Forget a blue Christmas – we’re havin’ a green one.

We were talking sustainability in work the other day and I discovered that my ma, the belle of the Oxfam shop, may also have been the Greta Thunberg of Antrim.

Not for us a new Christmas tree every year. No Norwegian spruce gave up his life for the McCann family’s pleasure. Ma planted our little tree in the garden.

Every Christmas, someone had to go outside and carefully dig it up, evict the worms, pot it and bring it inside for the festive season.

The blackbird who lived out our back used to cock his head quizzically in a way that clearly said: “What’s she at now?”

But, like my father, the bird knew better than to comment. The bird and my dad shook their heads and my dad kept digging.

That bird and I had history. We were never allowed to have pets as children. Six children were enough already. So, in the effort to have a pet of my own, I once spent a summer afternoon hiding behind our Christmas tree in the back garden, clutching a child’s fishing net. You know the type – long bamboo stick and green netting. (How I wish I were making this up).

I laid a trail of crumbs out and hoped that perhaps I’d catch the blackbird and tame it. I came close but he always dodged me just at the last minute. He was wise to my cunning plan.

But let us return to green Christmases, for we had sustainability in bucket loads.

The cows of Donegal gave us big fresh cow pats to help our potatoes grow and our cars stink. The blackbird and his mates pooed the seeds that gave us the raspberry bushes that gave us Ma’s jam each year. Ma made her own organic compost (death to all New Zealand flat worms) her own jam, her own lemonade.

The lemonade man visited not our house and the loss seemed cruel. So when I grew up, I got the ‘Maine man’ – because getting the Maine man was a badge of honour among children then. Oh yes to brown lemonade!

Once, ma also made us all individual Christmas cakes in a tres sustainable way. She took the empty tin cans from Heinz steamed puddings and recycled them to bake us each a miniature cake.

Of course, the cakes crumbled and, with six of us, there were a mighty lot of crumbs so my father cursed his inventive brilliant wife under his breath even as he hoovered for Ireland and picked out burnt raisins for weeks from between his bare toes.

I’m all for sustainability. For a start, not wrapping the presents is a beezer of an idea. (For anyone born post-1980, that means it is wonderful).

Wrapping presents was always the bane of my life. Somehow the task always fell to me.... until one Christmas Eve when my mother – who was so sustainable that she was not averse to a little (ahem) present recycling in a crisis – set me the task of wrapping up something for a neighbour who popped in.

Imagine our neighbour’s surprise when she handed my mother a box of marshmallows only to receive a large bottle of Estee Lauder from my mother in return.

Imagine my mother’s face when she saw that she’d just gifted a bottle of her favourite perfume for six Tunnocks.

It was a recycling error too far. I didn’t get the wrapping-up job after that.

But I do like to recycle myself. No new Christmas decorations about here – we still have the dried pasta sprayed with gold that our boy made in nursery 21 years ago.

It’s never Vogue but, like the lemonade man, it gets my vote. As I write this, it’s Tuesday and the election is a ghostly galleon hoving to in the mists of a stormy sea... and, what’s more, as they say about home, we’re all in the mouth of Christmas.

As the song says: there may be trouble ahead, but where there’s music and moonlight and love and romance, let’s face the music and dance.