WHAT would you like for Christmas that would cost no money at all to buy? Well think about it. Someone might ask you, one of about 17 people who owe you a gift, or to be less mercenary about things, someone who would genuinely like to give you something, but who doesn't have any cash at the moment. And there must be things we would like that don't cost money it's just that at this time of year it's hard to think of them, because we are too used to advertisements and Christmas features on last minute gifts, and presents for under 10. I can think of many things that wouldn't cost money as such which I'd love. Some of them admittedly, would cost a bit of petrol and mean that the giver would need to have the use of a car. Some of them, in fact, are gifts that I have been forgiven myself in the past and they rank high among the things I treasure. One of my nicest presents last year was from the friend who took me shopping. She met me off the DART in Lansdowne Road and headed for the five shops I wanted to visit. Her role was to sit outside with her car on a double yellow line and tell the guards or the traffic wardens that I was practically walking on all fours with arthritis and needed someone to wait for me and then when they pointed out, reasonably, that she had no disability sticker on her car, she would go off good naturedly and cruise around the block and come back for me, and I was never to think she had given up and gone home.
This worked fine for three shops, and part of the present was that I was to take my time and browse a bit, and not to race out for fear I was delaying her. So that's exactly what I did and it was great, and then I came out of the fourth shop and there was no sign of her at all.
Now it didn't matter very much because it was a grand mild day and I sat on the bonnet of someone's car until he came to drive it away, and didn't he turn out to be someone I taught 30 years ago and we had a great chat about life, and then I met a woman who asked me to stay where I was until she went and got some books to be signed, and I met another woman I had always had reservations about and she was so nice and pleasant I couldn't recall for the life of me why I had reservations in the first place. A shop owner brought out a stool for me to sit on when the ex-pupil rather selfishly drove his car away from under me. A stranger brought me a cup of coffee. A couple thought I was collecting for something and gave me a pound. And apart from my over heated imagination which kept delivering me pictures of my dear, kind friend being kidnapped at knife point, having a serious heart attack, being stricken with sudden amnesia so that she had forgotten not only me but her whole past life, I was really fine.
So fine that I wondered should I come into town regularly with my own stool and greet people, and behave like an amiable eccentric waving them on to their shopping.
By now I was waiting for 50 minutes, and felt there had to be some explanation. Then I saw her racing around a corner, face agitated.
I leapt from my stool and lifted it, ready to flatten her pursuer, but it turned out her car had gone on fire some blocks away and that people had been helping her quench the flames.
"Your presents are safe Maeve," she said, almost collapsing on the ground as if. I were going to beat her senseless with the stool for having put my Christmas gifts in danger by allowing her car to burn.
It was too far for me to walk to get a taxi so my good friend raced off again and said I wasn't to move, because she would send help and that the terms of the present meant she was to Bet me home afterwards, not to abandon me in the middle of the shopping.
So I sat there happily chatting to people who passed by, signing petitions against this and that explaining that I wasn't with a group of carol singers who had deserted me, and watching all couple about to buy an engagement ring. And I couldn't have been enjoying it more when a very confused taxi driver drew in beside me and asked me my name. He said that a wild woman had pressed these fivers into his hand, given a rough but obviously successful description of me sitting on a stool on the side of the street, and strict instructions not to drive me to Dalkey until the presents had been collected. He was to go first to a burning car near the Salvation Army hostel where the parcels Were all safe from the flames.
I delivered the stool back to the shop and got in. The taxi man said that the city was getting odder and odder, and in what I hope was a non sequitur said that the most unexpected people were as high as kites on drugs.
The car was belching Smoke but thankfully no flames and X was surrounded by an interested crowd. My friend was standing, mug of tea in hand, explaining the situation. Men from a nearby building site wondered would I like a mug of tea also toss help with the stress, but to be fair I wasn't suffering from stress, so, much as I would have liked to play "frightened victim of events" I couldn't really do so. Instead I played the role of "thoughtless selfish friend" and packed all my parcels into the taxi and went home leaving everyone else to deal with the arrival of the AA and more tea and the business of crowd dispersal.
Of course it cost her money to send me home to Dalkey in a taxi, and wear and tear on her nerves and wasted hours of her time, and her car mightn't have gone on fire if it hadn't been for all that stopping and starting.
Amazingly, she has offered to do it again this year, on the grounds that this could never happen again. And I will always love it as a gift because it is so generous and full of real thought . . . as are many presents that I would love this year.
Someone to come and take all the bottles to a bottle bank this would have to involve heavy environmental awareness so that we would all feel virtuous, and even heavier discretion so that they would never say just how many bottles were deposited.
Someone to sit down at the fairy lights and find the rogue one that's causing all the problems and then put them up before they go on the blink again.
Someone to sort out all the tapes and CDs and put the seasonal ones at the ready. And go through the old videos, rewinding them and sticking nice clean labels over something that says "Cor. Street Oct 7th".
Someone to drive you to a drinks party, then go off to the pictures and come back and drive you home again.
Someone to take your parcels to the post office wait in the queue, have them all weighed and stamped and fill in those declarations when needed.
Someone to tell you they would go to the garden centre and buy you 12 winter pansies if you gave them the money, but then come home and plant them for you where they would cheer everyone up for Christmas.
Someone to say you should get your things ready for the St Vincent de Paul by a given time and they will deliver them in time for Christmas something you have meant to do every year since memory began but have never got around to.
The list could go on and one when it comes to people being thoughtful at Christmas what on earth has money got to do with it?