This is a perilous time of year for Irish people living outside Ireland. We’re collectively guilty of sentimentalising Ireland anyway – it’s easier to focus on all the wonderful things when you step away from the everyday gripes and inconveniences that gave you a less romanticised relationship to home when you lived there.
From as far away as Australia, it’s easier to forget the lack of rail access to the country’s main airport, the price of a block of Kerrygold butter now that other countries have clocked that it is the greatest substance ever consumed, and the fact that excellent phrases like ‘grand drying out’ arise from experiencing approximately three hundred days of rain (or misty, sibilant liquid air) a year.
Having arrived in Australia just as the afterburn of summer was rendering everything autumnal and golden at home, it’s a bit soon to be heading back to Ireland for Christmas. Nobody really discusses the cost of moving across the world, for one thing. You spend the first several months at least trying to set up a new life under an unfamiliar system and large costs are incurred.
Rental homes are unfurnished as standard here in Australia’s capital city and it is cheaper to just buy a drab Ikea sofa here than it is to ship our (drab Ikea) sofa from the UK where we lived for five years until last August.
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[ ‘Our first Christmas in Australia will undoubtedly be an odd one’Opens in new window ]
As early summer radiates blurrily from the scrubby mountains here in Australia, our summer clothes and shoes are on a ship somewhere near Korea. Or they were last time I checked. They left the UK for Australia when we did, but that’s a relatively speedy pace. People have told me horror stories of waiting nine months for their things from home to arrive in Australia as cots and kids’ bikes, beds, family photo albums and granny’s teapot float across the circumference of the Earth, stopping at every conceivable port between Cork and Sydney.
Having lived in London for years before arriving here, I can tell you that this first Australian Christmas feels very different. Every Irish person has family in London. Even people who live there for 20 years are considered Ireland-adjacent. We see them more as tricking the British into employing them than taking the soup.
For Irish people, London is sort of like a fancy commuter town you put on a pair of business casual trousers to spend time in, but only because home can fall short, especially for younger people. We have always understood that young Irish people often need to seek work elsewhere. London is the Irish parent’s ideal choice if an adult child must emigrate. They are still close to home, and they’ll be back for Christmas.
As I face into my first Australian Christmas I am working hard not to sentimentalise Ireland. To be open to the possibility of experiencing something new, and to letting go of idealised conceptions of the past
This year, I will not be back for Christmas. The big day is weeks off as I write this and it’s already 30 degrees out. Very little feels like a form of Christmas that I recognise. And there is the danger – friends at home are traversing Grafton Street in woolly hats and sensible boots and sharing photos and videos on Instagram. Christmas parties are kicking off.
At home in Limerick, my family will be taking their chilly walks along the Shannon river as it mists and coils in the grey-white frost of a winter morning cold enough to flay an ungloved hand. Fairy lights penetrate the early darkness and hint toward a Spring that feels like it couldn’t ever actually arrive. Hot drinks and warm food and someone’s uncle singing next to a pub fire. Extended family you haven’t seen commenting that you’ve lost or gained weight, and you going into the kitchen for a moment to compose yourself so that you don’t push their face into a bowl of diarrhoea-soft Brussels sprouts “cooked’ by your aunt over three malodorous hours.
There are many kinds of Irish Christmas, but most will feature one of those at least. Just don’t actually eat the sprouts.
Christmas is strange for adults regardless. That lingering rumour of childhood magic settles around the month of December, but is soured by a tincture of misplaced expectation, distance from the past, and loss. The people gone or left behind, the empty places at the dinner table, the weird family dynamics bloated and bleeding beneath the microscope of Christmas day in a house together when you’ve all changed so much.
The way everyone regresses when they go home to be with parents, siblings, or even adult children, and we all play the part of ‘the worst version of me, but 20 years ago’, so that you find yourself storming upstairs enraged that ‘nobody gets me’ until you remember that you’re 40 and your bedroom is now full of beads and used by your mother to make her macrame wall art.
As I face into my first Australian Christmas, where everyone is so hot that many people opt for barbecued fish and cold side dishes, and we are located 3km from the surface of the sun so that to go out of doors without sunglasses is to be simply unable to see anything at all, I am working hard not to sentimentalise Ireland. To be open to the possibility of experiencing something new, and to letting go of idealised conceptions of the past.
This is an excellent time to remind all Irish emigrants that the lure of home can be overpowering at this time of year, but as our hearts travel home without us, we’re missing it. We’re missing whatever is going on around us, wherever we happen to be.
Sometimes, home is more perfect in imagination than reality.
Just think of your aunt’s sprouts.
