Coming over the stone cap of the Burren for Christmas in the seventies in my dear departed Ann's native Ennistymon, there came a special stretch outside fabled Kilfenora where you saw the Atlantic and the edges of the Cliffs of Moher and all the farming homes huddled down against the chill of Christmas Eve, the fat plumes of turf smoke from all their chimneys and, above all, the big red Christmas candles in the front windows of each and every one of them as a signal of welcome to the Child.

It was a sight that used almost bring tears to my eyes every year because of its sheer beauty but also, when I think of it, even though I was then digging into my late thirties, I was  still a child at this time of year yet,  and I was going to my wife's home  for Christmas, not to my own hearth in Fermanagh away up north.

And even as we played and chatted  with our own excited brood, I was back home at the age of eight beside Sandy and Mary hanging up my stocking on the mantelpiece for Santa Claus.

Heading for 40 years later, my own children now helping my grandchildren hang up their  stockings, there is still a little place inside my cracked head where I am 10 and believe in Santa Claus. It is one of the beauties of the season that I think we all have that small mental niche buried away behind all the scars inflicted by the world that kills so many of the fairytales and eventually executes so many of our pure innocences; extinguishes the most of the sparks in our wide eyes.

We had a family gathering in Galway at the start of Christmas week. It was to exchange gifts and love, to reinforce the pull of blood and breed, to allow the grandchildren to look at Dado and whisperingly ask their mothers if this silvery bearded one was at all connected to Santa Claus. (It is my inevitable response that we are cousins on my father's side, and if they have been good I will put in a good word for them!)

And with Galway Bay gleaming on a frosty night outside Scobie's front window, we were all warm and fulfilled and happy until it came to that point in the evening when all the little ones were getting tired, and it was time to kiss them and to go back home again to Clare, again over the stone cap of the Burren like so many years before.

I know that there are less simple big red candles burning in the Christmas windows nowadays. It is a changed  world, and property insurance has intervened in many cases. It has snuffed out a lot of wicks.  

What has replaced the candles in this New Ireland are gardens filled with neon gnomes and reindeer, giant sleighs resting on rooves, all manner of flashing multi-colored illuminations.

You can often see a very obese and very brightly lit Santa hanging from a rope of lights on his way up to the chimney. In fact you can see about anything that can glow, flash, flicker or ripple. It’s enough to create a pool of global warmth around the whole of Clare.

A small percentage of the decorations are tasteful, dignified, quite beautiful to behold. The majority of the displays, however, go way over the top. You long for the simple welcoming candle  in the window.

It is with a shock that I discover Irish homes did not have Christmas trees  until about the sixties.
 

When we believed in Santa Claus   there were never Christmas trees in any house. There were holly boughs on the mantelpiece, and ivy with plump red berries on the windowsills, but the Christmas trees with the lights had not yet replaced the old candles of pure faith and beeswax.

Most kitchens and living rooms with their ranges or open fires were criss-crossed with two paper chains over which links of balloons had been placed.  
And all the incoming Christmas cards were lined up on the breast of the chimney near the Sacred Heart lamp.

Most of them featured either the fundamental image of the crib or a red robin perched on a fence in a snowy garden. And there was also the occasional coach and four on the high road to somewhere far away.

And on Christmas Day after the  traditional Midnight Mass hours earlier (for which you were fasting for hours in order to receive Communion), there were far more geese devoured than the big bronze  turkeys you never see at all  nowadays. They have been replaced by white turkeys that may be plumper but always look albino and sad during the fattening season.

I have a feeling it was only posh families who had turkeys down the years we believed in Santa Claus.  Much has changed, but thank God this special season is still the time of goodwill. Goodwill, apart from its legal usage, is not a word much heard at all for the rest of the year.

But the Irish Christmas, especially on Christmas Eve, still pulses with that kind of goodwill which turns strangers into comrades, neighbors into friends, friends and families into a warmly reinforced corps of the blood.

And in any room in which there are young children awaiting the magical arrival of Santa Claus, there is not one adult who does not themselves discover that mental niche where we all believe in Santa and the Child that began it all for so many of us.

And if you look in the mirror you can even see the ghosts of the magical sparkles of the pure innocences in there somewhere. And that is beautiful.

I wish all readers everywhere, whatever their age, all the peace and goodwill of the season.

And just a little of that feeling we all shared when we were young and Santa never, ever failed to come down the chimney.

God bless you all into the New Year.