House Rules: on making tradition

Christmas is all about tradition. Well, it is also about presents, overeating, family – plus anxiety about all three. But let’s stick with the tradition. There’s midnight Mass perhaps, the tree and the beloved baubles that come out of their bags, dating from when we still had plastic, year after year.

I like that part, remembering Switzers and other shops now gone. There's mince pies, and stockings, and the ornament we hang up on the way through to the dining room (for the one time a year we ever really use it), that no one actually likes.

Traditions come and go, while seductively making you think they’ve been around forever. I love our Christmas Day walk, looking at the festive dogs embarrassed by their tinsel collars, and marvelling at the shivering swimmers. When I was younger, carol singers came door-to-door. In Achill, I joined in the procession drumming in the New Year. Did they once do that all over Ireland?

Our newer traditions don’t quite match up. Christmas jumpers: once the preserve of the occasional unfortunate with a demon-knitter auntie or granny, they’re now a marketing spree.

The Twelve Pubs of Christmas comes with its own rules, so complex that you'd almost think it was a registered sport, though it's both unpleasant and insane. Black Friday only makes sense if you have a couple of days off over Thanksgiving. The Big Day in Ireland used to be December 8th. The Feast of the Immaculate Conception transmogrified into people from the country coming up to Dublin to perform the secular miracle of changing cheques into presents.

Black Friday shows how marketing is behind a great many of our “new” traditions. Get enough retailers and PR companies to push something, and it becomes a Moment.

That’s why, in the spirit of keeping the economy afloat through the lean New Year, I’d like to propose a new tradition. It’s a risky business, after all, just look at Arthur’s Day, but if all the shops would like to get behind Gemma’s Day, at a date to be confirmed in late January, I’m sure we can make a go of it. Just send your presents to the office. And in the meantime, a very happy Christmas to you all.