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Ireland: the only country that treats Christmas as a six-week crisis

If we don’t rein it in, the Emergency will start bleeding into the remaining three seasons

Christmas: it helps to remember that it is just a day. Photograph: iStock

Jennifer O'Connell's face
Jennifer O'Connell
Sat Dec 23 2017 - 06:00

The good plates have been taken down from the press and dusted off, primed for battle. Someone has been sent up to the attic to retrieve the camp bed that has been proudly serving the family chronic backache since 1972.

A special envoy has been dispatched into town to find the last box of Christmas crackers, and those finger biscuits you put in the tiramisu that no one can ever remember the name of, but upon whose procurement the very future of humanity might as well now depend.

In the kitchen the annual stand-off over whether or not to bother with the Brussels sprouts is under way, culminating in derision when someone suggests pan-frying them with caramelised walnuts. The notions. The crisis blows up in earnest when it is discovered that the turkey is too big to go in the oven, and that persons unknown have been making early inroads into the good biscuits. When it seems like things can’t get any worse, word comes through that they’re out of cuddly socks in Penneys.

The rest of the world calls it Christmas. Or “the holidays”. Or “the festive season”. If you’re Irish, though, you know it as The Emergency.

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The Emergency starts somewhere around the beginning of December, when every sector of the economy, apart from fast-moving consumer goods, grinds slowly to a halt. At first, this is manifested via emails written in tones of increasing urgency. “We’ll need it THIS SIDE OF CHRISTMAS,” the emails announce, in a manner that implies ‘Christmas’ is another word for ‘The Apocalypse’. Then people stop answering emails altogether on Fridays. As the day itself draws closer, they stop answering them on Mondays and Thursdays, too, and other days after midday.

To the bafflement of all other nationalities living here, we manage to convey being simultaneously bereft at the thought that we might not see one another “between now and the day itself”, and horrified at the prospect that we might. “It’s a bit close to Christmas now, isn’t it? Would we not put that back till January?”

Hilarious requests

Requests for last-minute lunch reservations or hair appointments are greeted with hilarity, or sympathy for the poor eejit who doesn’t seem to be aware that there’s an Emergency on. Shopping trips this close to the off are like the physical fitness tests prospective marines in the US have to undergo. The big shop must happen at least 10 days before the day itself, and if you don’t come home sweating, exhausted and bleeding from your eyeballs – bearing 15km worth of tinfoil, seven types of dips and four kinds of poppyseed crackers – you’d better not come home at all.

We'll be giving out medals of valour in Áras an Uachtaráin to people who finish their shopping before November 1st

Treating Christmas as a National Emergency is a peculiarly Irish phenomenon. Americans love their “holiday season”, but they generally manage to handle it as an enjoyable interlude of 24-48 hours, rather than a six-week crisis.

“There’s no point trying to set up a call with the Dublin office in December,” my former colleagues in the big multinational in the US would say. “Where are they? Have they all gone skiing?”

No, I'd say, explaining that while we don't take off en masse to ski, we do engage in a variety of other seasonal national sports: watching the four-hour-long live televised unboxing event known as The Late Late Toy Show; arguing about whether the quality of Roses has deteriorated; making frantic arrangements to meet people we have no interest in seeing the other 11 months, and then spending days trying to devise creative ways to get out of them; complaining about how the Christmas season has got longer every year, and simultaneously resolving to start shopping in September next year.

Medals of valour

I hate to admit it, but the American colleagues had a point. We’re rightly proud of the seriousness with which we take preparations for this annual festival of excess, but if we don’t rein it in, the Emergency will start bleeding into the remaining three seasons. We’ll be giving out medals of valour in Áras an Uachtaráin to people who finish their shopping before November 1st.

My mother has a great saying for this time of the year. It’s only a day, she says, with the lonely air of Neil deGrasse Tyson giving the annual keynote at the Flat Earth Society. No, the unredacted JFK files do not prove he knew the earth was flat. And yes, Christmas really is genuinely only a single day. (Her point is only slightly undermined by the fact that she will have started shopping and menu planning in September herself.)

Whether you regard the next few days as the happiest time of the year, or a gruelling feat of endurance, it’s worth remembering that – for all sense of crisis it brings out in us – it is just a day. Food and words will be eaten. Presents and old wounds will be ripped open. Tears and drinks will be spilled. Laughs and Quality Street will be shared. For better or worse, most of us will survive it. And by January we’ll be wondering what all the panic was about.

Happy Emergency. See you on the other side.

joconnell@irishtimes.com