Katy Hayes's first collection of short stories, Forecourt, was published last year. Her first novel will be published by Phoenix House next March.

MY first acting role was when I was around six or seven, trying to convince my parents that I still believed in Santa. I'm the third child in our family so of course I was disabused of the notion of Santa early on. But there were profound economic consequences if you let on so I kept that up as long as I could.

I remember being taken to the National Gallery's Christmas painting classes as a child. Robert Ballagh was doing it that year and that was fairly influential my first ambition was to be a painter. I even went to a design college as a result of that. Those classes are great fun when you're a kid.

A few years on I was mad about roller discos. I think I spent my life in the roller disco between the ages of 13 and 16 one of the things I remember most was coming from the roller disco to midnight Mass and kissing a boy at the back of the church. The rest of my adolescence was clouded by hormones I think. Certainly that's the Christmas that sticks in my memory.

As an adult I worked in a kebab shop for five years Flash Harry's in Blackrock and there were all sorts of financial inducements to work Christmas Eve, so I always did. Commerce over pleasure. I did the same when I worked in the petrol station the money was just too good to turn down so Christmas has always been inextricably linked to commerce for me.

Christmas 1992 was the time I met my husband and we arranged our first date, so I remember it fondly. We arranged to go to a Jonathan Miller lecture on theatre . . . not very date like! I think romance is more easily available at Christmas the parties make it easier to meet people and nobody gives out to you at Christmas if you do something stupid or uncharacteristic.

The best present I ever got was from my mother. It was a season ticket to the Dublin Film Festival. At the time I was unemployed so I had the time to go off and see the films in the daytime. Now I just don't have the time.

This year we are going to my husband's family for Christmas. We have a very elaborate cooking system in place for it we all have different jobs. I love this time of year.

Dermot Healy's memoir, The Bend For Home, which was short listed for the 1996 Esquire/Waterstones Non-Fiction Prize was published earlier this year.

ONE of the best Christmases I ever had was in London in the early 1970s. There was fierce weather and it was impossible to get back to Ireland and all these people who'd come from Germany and Finland and Poland through London to get back home to Ireland for Christmas got stranded in London. A load of them ended up in my flat and we cooked turkey for 12-15 people. We threw a load of grass into the stuffing and of course everyone had brought all this drink back to take to Ireland so we were on the best Polish vodka and whatever they drink in Finland . . . it was a great Christmas.

I've had some strange Christmases since then. My father died on Christmas Day, my mother on Christmas Eve and my aunt died on Boxing Day, so Christmas has been difficult. Instead of Christmas Day we've had a wake. Someone had left us but was still in the house ... it was not as if we were at home at all. There was none of the gaiety, only a sense of tragedy.

These past years I haven't been overwhelmed by the happiness of Christmas too much. It's as if it's a tradition in the family now to have a wake at Christmas. It has you always on the look out around this time because of the tragedies of other years.

I've spent a couple on my own. Last Christmas was very strange I went around to a friend's house here in Sligo and we started drinking sloe gin . . . it's not the happiest drink in the world.

I grew up in a bakery my mother and my aunt ran so we had all the usual Christmas food and we had the tree and everything. This year Helen and I will be here in Sligo for Christmas. It'll be a relaxed one. We'll have a few people round maybe. We've been away for a bit in Tunisia and we were coming back through the village and they've put up a crib somebody has actually knitted the figures in the crib. It was nice to come back to. I love the air in December. There's a sheen in the air, a sense of anticipation this year we'll have it fairly quiet, I think.

Jack Hanna is a freelance journalist whose book, The Friendship Tree, was published earlier this year. A memoir of his late wife Brid and son Davoren, the book was his account of bringing up a severely disabled, immensely gifted child, who died at the age of 19, and the loss of his wife, who died in 1993 of a heart attack at the age of 45.

CHRISTMAS was always a very hard time for Brid and I, especially Brid because she took the brunt of the crises as they happened.

We went always riding a crisis with Davoren at that time of year. We never had Christmas the way it was for other people. One wonderful Christmas though, the three of us went to Letterfrack and Davoren was at his best, full of poems and music and craic he would write these praise poems for everyone who came to visit. I think he was around 12 or 13 at the time and we were all having Christmas drinks and he got plastered. Really it was a very relaxed Christmas, it was my happiest memory.

Brid would get the worst times because for 10 years I was an international telephone operator and on two Christmases I had to work. Day loved it the presents, the energy of it all but it could be a very tense time. It took Brid and I a few years to learn not to get upset if Christmas didn't conform to a rosy picture.

When Davoren was around five or six we reached a very low ebb at Christmas. He was in hospital and the prognosis wasn't good. We were afraid we would lose him then. Getting through those kind of occasions was what a lot of our Christmases came to be about.

After Brid's death, Davoren and I went down to Cleggan in Galway for Christmas. Davoren had stopped eating at that point. He was being fed through tubes but we had a lovely Christmas together. It has been hard enough these past couple of years without them. Brid's birthday is around this time and that adds a little extra note.

This year I'll be with my friend Margaret Gleeson and her family for Christmas. My own parents died in early January. I'm not one for all the over eating and watching TV in a stupor on Christmas Day. I like to get out for a good walk or a swim instead.

I believe in Christmas behind the hype, I do think the spirit of the season can come through, though the break down of the cease fire depressed me an awful lot that endless circle of recrimination. A new ceasefire would be the best Christmas present of all.

Catherine Dunne is a school teacher in Kilbarrack, Dublin. Her first novel, In The Beginning, will be published by Jonathan Cape in March.

I used to wonder why my mother folded with exhaustion at the end of every Christmas Day. It used to puzzle me that she never came into town with the rest of us on Christmas Eve, preferring to stay at home and top and tail brussels sprouts ... Twenty years of shopping, chopping arid Christmas dinners later I now know why.

Fortunately, I enjoy all the comings and goings. For the last 13 years since my son Eamonn was born we've stayed at home and usually have a full house. We average seven or eight for dinner but one year we had 14. It was great fun but needed the advance planning of a protracted military campaign.

We moved house when Eamonn was five and our first Christmas here was magical. He was terrified that Santa wouldn't have his new address or that he wouldn't know where his new bedroom was. For a full week before the big night we made posters, cut out cardboard arrows and hung up huge signs with This Way Santa" on them so the bearded, one wouldn't lose his way. He didn't and, he even made large, sooty footprints on the bare floorboards one set leading to the stairs, and one set leading back to the fireplace. The excitement at 4 a.m. was something else. The only puzzle was, if the 24 hour shop stayed open all day and all night, how come they never saw Santa on the roof?

I suppose my fantasy Christmas would be on a cruise liner or in a medieval castle, filled to the brim with family and friends. We would throw one hell of a party. And someone else would do the washing up.

Mike McCormack won this year's Rooney Prize for his debut collection of short stories, Getting It In The Head. His first novel, Crowe's Requiem, is scheduled for publication by Jonathan Cape in the next 12 months.

FOR me Christmas means my brother coming home from England. There are four of us myself, Tommy, who works on the sites over there, Jane Eva who is a teacher, and AG, who is studying. We all get together for Christmas with my mother in Louisburgh where I also live.

I remember reading someone saying a few years ago about the sites being Ireland's national service everyone goes off to England to do their two years. It's true. Not everyone does the sites but the emigration from this part of the country is extreme.

What I love about Christmas is everyone coming home again. There were 40 people in my Leaving Cert class of 1984 and I think there's about seven of us still around the place. But at Christmas the pubs are jammed again. You get to see everyone and go out drinking. The place comes alive.

Generally we've always spent Christmas in Louisburgh, although sometimes we went to Belmullet to my mother's family. We have a very traditional Christmas. We go the whole nine yards, the tree, the turkey .

With the money I got from the Rooney Prize I finally got a car you really need one "when you're out where we are on the coast Last year was the first Christmas we were disabled by the weather. It was very difficult to go anywhere and so this year we'll have the car. If the weather isn't too rough I guess we'll go for a spin in it on Christmas Day. I enjoy Christmas having my brother back really makes it something great and having the whole family together ... for us Christmas really is about family.