The Irish Homecoming - There’s no place like home for the Christmas holidays - food laughter, love and being spoilt by Santa

April Drew and her family enjoy their first Christmas while settling back into Ireland

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Colum and Sadie get into the Christmas spirit.

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I swore to myself I’d only ever give my children one big toy and two little toys each Christmas in an effort to prevent them from being spoiled (and to follow on from what my mother did with us). 

Well, that plan went west with the wind when I went into the attic to retrieve the bits I brought home from New York. I forgot about the tent, the car, the dozens of books and everything else. 

“Ah just this year I’ll give them everything and I’ll implement my ‘rule’ next year,” I said to John. He laughed as if to say, “We’ll see.”

And naturally on top of Santa spoiling the kids in our house in Limerick, John’s family, our wonderful friends in New York and my family in Kerry doubled the toy load, so now I have enough toys to open up a store if I wanted to. 

But aside from spoiling the kids, there isn’t a better feeling in the world than being able to sit down with our families on Christmas Day and have dinner. It’s nice to reminisce about our childhood pasts, tease each other about things that have gone haywire in our lives, dump Brussels sprouts onto someone else’s plate when mother isn’t looking, argue over whose turn it is to clean up and, most of all, laugh all day at the antics of our kiddies, our babies who kept us fully entertained throughout the Christmas. 

My brother Gavin (my only sibling) also got engaged to his beautiful fiancée Carol on Christmas Eve, so it added to the celebrations this year. 

I wrote about it before, the sadness and heartache of sitting in an apartment in New York Skyping our families on Christmas Day. It’s hard and you make the most of a sad situation over there by spending it with friends (our New York family), so we took nothing for granted this Christmas. 

We went for the traditional Chinese dinner with John’s crew on Christmas Eve followed by a marathon of the Irish TV show Love/Hate on the telly. We woke the kids up at 8 a.m. on Christmas morning and watched with excitement as they opened their Santa presents. 

We then attended 10 a.m. Mass with the Mooney clan and all headed back to John’s mom’s house for a fantastic fry-up and more gift giving.  We were on the road to Kerry (I’m from Tralee) at 12.30 p.m. and were sitting down at Nana Liz’s dinner table by 3 p.m. 

To say we were stuffed would have been an understatement, but wasn’t everyone in the same boat!

The weather was extremely mild – in the 60’s -- so we didn’t get a white Christmas (instead we all got flus) but the rain held off which made visiting all our friends and some more family on St. Stephen’s Day a pleasure. 

I heard many times prior to the 25th that “it doesn’t feel like Christmas this year.” I smiled but never concurred. 

Since the beginning of December I had the car radio tuned into the dedicated Christmas music station. All the shops had decorations, bright lights and festive tunes playing, all the shopping centers around the city had Santa Claus visiting. 

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