The Christmas memories a

New York Irishman will hold forever

In the quiet days between Christmas and the New Year, when time seems stretched out on elastic, and memory lands on the doorstep of childhood, there is often a feeling that you're about as far from home as you can ever be.

To spend a Christmas away from home is a form of remembering, a chance to return to those gone years when things might have been simpler, freer, less cluttered.

Perhaps there's something in the nature of those who leave that they go precisely because they want to remember. It happens most often for the immigrant, the emigrant and the displaced, but perhaps there is a part of all of us that allows ourselves distance simply because we crave those years and the ability to step backwards.

Certainly, for me, when I have a Christmas in New York -- and what could be more alive than Christmas in this rolling, sprawling, lovely, ugly, brash, light-splattered rubbish heap of a city? -- I still manage to return to those quiet Christmas mornings when I woke to the ticking of the radiator in our suburban Dublin home, and the sky outside was as blue as Septembers later would become, and the cold of the windowpane would snap me awake, and the leap down the staircase was effortless and full of promise, and the days would spread themselves out almost endlessly towards the New Year when all the promises of last year were made to be broken.

My children and I buy a sixty-dollar tree in the bodega on Lexington Avenue and quite easily I am brought back to a parking lot of Dunnes Stores in Cornelscourt where the trees were sold out of an old white van for a couple of quid by a man in a dark anorak.

We carry the tree up along Park Avenue -- where the lights step elegantly along the traffic median and the carols escape from the Episocpalian church -- and I am just as soon carrying it up along the Clonkeen Road, beyond the Texaco garage, and home.

We nod to the doorman and shoehorn the tree into the tiny elevator, but at the same time I can almost hear the doorbell ringing in number 173 to announce that we're back, and could my sister please get the box of decorations from under the stairs?

We can never find the tree stand in our 86th Street apartment, and that's possibly because nobody can ever find the tree stand in any country, place, or era: it's the curse of Christmas that you have to spend at least an hour looking for the damn thing.

In New York we impale a leprechaun on the top of our tree. It's done with a great deal of irony and laughter, the poor wooden figurine not exactly sitting on a pot of gold. There was never a leprechaun at home in Dublin, but there were certainly jokes made about the white angel and that curious look on her face as the days went by.

Then there's the food, of course. My wife is from an Italian family and so on Christmas Eve we make homemade cappelleti, hat-shaped filled with meat and served in a fragrant chicken broth. It's great stuff, a ritual in itself, kneading, rolling, cutting, shaping, boiling.

Our table heaves with pasta, capon and wine. The afternoon finds us as fat as old tyres, leaning up against one another, making Monty Python jokes about one last thin wafer. The fridge door is hard to close. The wine bottles go out for recycling.

It's a bounty, for sure, and I feel blessed by it, but I can't help but feel a pang of honest nostalgia for the gravy and the spuds and the sixpence we used to bite into in the fruitcake, and the afternoon pop of the Quality Street box after slagging the Queen about her speech. And why was it, I now wonder, that we cared about the Queen's speech at all? Perhaps it was the irreverent way that we could deny her silence, that we could become a family simply by laughing her into oblivion.

Twelve years ago, on the first Christmas that I became a father, I was faced with a dilemma. An American Christmas is sometimes a tamer thing than an Irish Christmas, and Santa gets his milk and cookies, then disappears, well-fed, into the night. But my Santa Claus -- or the one I grew up with -- used to get a heavy dollop of whiskey to send him red-faced away, and he would always leave a note by the fireplace saying how much the whiskey had warmed him, how much he appreciated it, how he'd be back for it next year, and I better be a good lad.

The question between my wife, Allison, and I was: Whose ritual would become our ritual? We came to a simple compromise, and these days our New York Santa gets his milk and cookies, of course, but he also gets his glass full of whiskey, and his whiskey brings him home again, the three swallows in flight on the label reminding him of other Christmas Eves on Grafton Street in the late afternoon with the music coming from Golden Discs and the lights dimming everywhere except in McDaids pub, a beacon itself for other ghosts.

The days go by, and we return. Each year something new comes back to me, odd little details that form the canvas of nostalgia: the way the binmen used to hover outside the house waiting for their Christmas tip, the crepe paper that was strung along the hallway with old cards taped to them, the endless string of crappy songs on Radio Dublin, the corny jokes in the crackers, the verbal operas of the women on Moore Street selling the last of the wrapping paper, the mad hunt for batteries on Stephen's Day, the way my father would slice open the champagne cork with a knife on New Year's Day and put a coin inside to remind us of the year that had been.

Sometimes I think that I remember my Decembers so clearly now simply because of the very fact that I've been gone from Ireland for the best part of two decades.

If I had remained in Dublin they might not matter to me so much, or they might just slip quite easily into the ordinary Lego of time.

Memory has a touch of the wound in it, and there are times when it chooses to sprinkle salt on the raw cut. Only then do we know that we are truly awake. There is a complexity in being away. So perhaps I should someday write and tell my parents that I left Ireland in order to stay with them, that maybe I took off in order to experience the complexity of an imaginative return.

It might be an emigrant's guilty excuse, or it might be the truth. Most likely it is both, all at once, since to hold two ideas far from each other, in opposition to each other, is a form of being and going at the same time.

There is a wonderful Portuguese word, "saudade," which indicates that person or place or object which draws out of us our most intense yearning or desire.

It is a feeling for something which is gone, but might, some day, return. It often hits us at the oddest times, a need for presence as opposed to absence.

It is, in this sense, my Dublin and also, in this sense, the way I relate to Christmas.

There are, of course, certain things about New York Christmases that are so much better than those I had in Dublin. There's the tree in Rockefeller Center. There's the snow that's likely to dust the paths of Central Park. There's the sound of the Salvation Army bells on the street corners. There's the insanity of Fifth Avenue as the season rolls on: sometimes it seems like a comedy of greed.

There are the Santa Clauses rolling around Times Square. There are the outrageous fashions in the Village. There's the New Year's Eve mini-marathon: drunk and sober, high and low, thousands of New Yorkers go running at midnight.

It's a city to revel in at Christmas time, but, quite honestly, my Christmas is still a childhood Christmas, a Dublin Christmas, and my New Year is still a childhood New Year, a Dublin New Year, when I would run outside at my own midnight, singing an awful Slade song, and banging my mother's saucepans off the front gate, denting the pans and making a horrible racket.

What a wayward mess those days were: I wouldn't swap them.

I suppose the purpose of memory is to depict -- and therefore to make as if forever present -- what is absent. We learn to make up for what is lost, or gone. And so we go back and we re-inhabit what used to be. We fill our present with our past.

At the same time, of course, we change the way we remember, and we look around us to see how our current days will be recalled by those who are younger than us. I often wonder how it is my own kids will choose to recall their own Christmases and New Years, and where they will be, and who will they be preparing other Christmases for?

This is, increasingly, the magic of growing older -- the question of where and when my own loved ones will look back on the time that I try to shape for, and alongside, them. They have their Christmas here, they carry their fir tree along Lexington, they impale the poor leprachaun, they delight in making the cappelleti, their own American days.

But maybe part of them will always return to Dublin too, or maybe they will go there themselves one day. Perhaps they will take on my accent, or the words that I have dropped along the way. And maybe, just maybe, they will send them to me some Christmas in the decades to come and -- oddly delighted --I will unwrap their absence slowly and with care.

Irish Independent