Kill's old Church of Ireland needed three Super Sers to warm the icy interior: wintry gusts blew out the candles, the drizzle knocked the shine off our millennium hairdos on the walk to the Catholic Church, and the service went on just long enough to worry serious drinkers.
But as the bells of the two churches rang out for the last light on Christianity's second millennium, for 500 souls of the parish of Ardclough, Kill and Johnstown, nowhere on earth could have been more appropriate. As a way of bridging that unnamable millennial abyss between fear and exhilaration, regret and reconciliation, sadness and hope, that little service accomplished much.
We wished our neighbours well as we turned to re-light our candles. As a child played the flute, we saluted our ancestors, remembered St Brigid with her church of wood and wattle, and recalled a time when the parish was made up of a few little sweetshops, the gymkhana and the GAA.
We sang and prayed for peace and a world of justice and were reminded that life is an endless process of letting go:
"Our lives are made of days and nights, of seasons and years, for we are part of a universe of suns and moons and planets. We mark ends and we make beginnings and in all, we praise God for the grace and mercy that fill our days."
As he set off for the scouts' hall, where the ICA women were brewing up the tea, parish priest Father Willie O'Byrne admitted that he was overwhelmed at the turnout. And he was entitled to be. There were a few of us present whom he sees no more than twice a year. Now, shockingly, here we were, twice in the same week.
The ends of millenniums are like that. A sense of impending doom; a sudden, desperate search for meaning; a Babel of confusion; all distilled in the end, to a few sane, quiet moments, a salute to the past and a prayer for the future.
And what then? What did we do on this night of nights? Well, we did what we always do. The sweetly predictable circle of family and friends arrived with a few welcome additions, bearing enough food and champagne to keep this family reheating and rechilling in style for a week.
At midnight, we shuffled outside to raise our glasses and send off the fireworks, then hugged and grinned in that dizzy, self-conscious ritual of loving and remembering, made all the more poignant through a million shared memories.
There was a sense that we ought to be saying profound things to one another. Indeed, someone had the notion of inviting little contributions from everyone about the meaning of it all. After all, we had a broad mix to draw from - lawyers, farmers, a millennium bug expert, an estate agent, business, media and medical people. Alas, he left it a shade too late to extract the required coherence from this motley crew.
And damn, damn, why aren't we the kind of parents who get their children to write long reams of "what-it's-like-to-be-a-young-person-as-the-old-millennium-ends" stuff and bury it ceremoniously in a time capsule as the clock strikes 12? Or pore over maps of suitable mountain eyries and prepare flasks and hampers to witness the new millennium's first light?
Instead, alas, one could spy the "young persons" across the grass, laughing uproariously (probably at us), clanking good champagne glasses in alarmingly robust fashion, declaring better than any laboriously-written scroll that the new millennium belongs to them and to hell with the crystal heirlooms or freezing on a mountain top. Then one of the (adult) "revellers" locked us out, grinning viciously at us from behind the door, as we hurled abuse and incubated pneumonia in the first icy moments of that new bloody millennium.
A highly satisfactory, common-or-garden New Year's Eve then . . .
It was meant to be so different. Much earlier in the year, one of our number had come up with the idea of booking dinner in a hotel and having a huge reunion. That fell by the wayside after resistance which, for some, was down to apathy (the date seemed so far away) and for others, a refusal to abandon their children on this night of nights. (Why this last consideration never occurred to the would-be babysitting millionaires still baffles me. It was never the money that was going to present the problem, just the usual old tug of love).
Principally, though, the resistance of those with grown children and plans of their own came down to a vague distaste about the entire event. For some of us, the notion of sitting in pampered comfort, being served by one's fellow human beings during a momentous celebration supposed to encompass everyone, rankled.
Money and manipulation had become the pivotal issues. The idiocy of attempting to capture two millennium dawns by Concorde or paying £35,000 for the hire of a castle made £600-a-day hotels seem restrained. The horsetrading surrounding the greasing of palms of everyone from essential medical workers to publicans to taxi-drivers turned the word millennium into a term of abuse. The emotional manipulation reached a nadir with a letter to a deeply troubled friend from a lay church organisation.
The "friendly" but firm missive was to remind him of the enormous donation he is required to make: "Great chance to clean the slate for last millennium and start the new fresh!"
It was only as these miserable, spiritsapping issues receded in recent weeks that many people found a quiet space to reconsider. And no one was more amazed than they as suddenly, the issue of where and how to mark this turning-point assumed unexpected significance. Whatever your beliefs, this seemed like a night to remember, a night for remembering.
A woman overheard declaiming this loudly in a restaurant was challenged by her bolshy teenage child. "Well, bottom line here is, it's the 2,000th birthday of Christ," barked the mother, "as if you care."
The child curled his lip: "So why didn't you have your big, bloody piss-up on Christmas day then?"
That had me stumped too. But in any event, normally sane folk were suddenly plotting to reunite long-lost, indeed loathed siblings. Others dug out decades-old diaries, determined to find old friends and re-establish a bond with their roots.
It didn't happen of course. But the sense of trying to impose a meaning on it lingered. We will make this journey into a new millennium only once, a friend repeated ad nauseam. It may be only psychological, but up there among the primary images is the sense of the passing of a torch. We struggle with the image of our vibrant, counter-culture, baby-boomer generation fading into history.
What happened to our dreams? Whom have we betrayed? Have we made a difference? Why has this generation, above all others, steadfastly refused to reconcile itself to George Orwell's belief that "Men can only be happy when they do not assume the purpose of life is happiness"?
A friend whispers that he looks on his children with envy. "This will be their century, not ours. I wish I could be one of them," he says wistfully.
Babies born after midnight on January 1st are destined to be "as old as the century". We will be the ones looking on in wonder and bewilderment as they shape the new era. Overnight, as one writer put it, "we have become the new Victorians".
So yes, it meant something that went beyond commerce and conspicuous spending. One friend, watching daytime television with his elderly father while the new millennium's first moments rolled across the globe was so moved by certain images that he opted to stay at home and value their time together. Who was not shaken by the sight of Nelson Mandela in his old prison cell in what has become Robben Island's museum of reconciliation, solemnly lighting a candle and handing it to his successor, who gave it to a child? Or the simple ceremony in which black children with candles created a living map of Africa?
Who was not moved by the scenes in Berlin, its reunited people articulating their heartfelt hopes for a peaceful new age? Who could look at Israel's 2,000 doves and not associate the new millennium with the realistic chance, at last, that this country - where Christianity's clock began to tick 2,000 years ago - will find peace with all its neighbours?
Or the people of Tonga welcoming the new age with a glorious rendering of the Hallelujah chorus? Or Vaclav Havel in Prague telling the world's rich to cancel the debts of the poor? Or Bill Clinton evoking the memory of Martin Luther King in front of the Lincoln Memorial, where King once made a speech that would define the dreams of hundreds of millions?
Other spectacles might not have grabbed one by the throat but they sure helped to light up the screen. The Eiffel Tower, with its 20,000 bulbs and horizontal explosions of light; London's Dome, samba dancers and extraordinary river-based firework display; New York's giant Waterford crystal globe plunging from the pole at Number 1, Times Square, unleashing four tons of ticker tape.
As for Dublin . . . Well, the Waterford Crystal globe may have been in New York, and the Corrs and Van Morrison in London, but we, dear reader, had better than that: we, said Seamus Brennan, had style and dignity.
A perplexed-looking American couple trudging the empty, shuttered city streets that evening told a friend they were here because they had been told that this was the party capital of the world. My friend could have told them about what might have been . . . about John Stephenson's six-year-old proposal to light the Irish coast with bonfires that could be seen from space, or Michael Colgan's idea to get every Dubliner out on their own streets at midnight, to link arms and make a party of it.
But let's be positive and pretend that we actually planned it to happen like this. Let's just say that the entire world has made an ass of itself because only the Irish remembered that this wasn't the real millennium and that's why we displayed such - eh - style and dignity.
Next year, we're going to do it properly, just wait and see. Ronan Keating might even have his special millennium song ready by then.
