Locker Room: One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the Northside corner, the distant speaking of the gardaí at the door the only sound I'd sometimes hear a moment before sleep, writes Tom Humphries.

I can never remember whether we were bailed for six days and six nights when I was 12 or whether it was for 12 days and 12 nights when I was six.

We always knew, though, when winter was on the way. From September onwards we'd feel our little hands get mottled blue and deathly numb in the afternoons. Ah, they knew how to swing a leather, those Christian Brothers. Fine wristy strikers all of them.

And like shepherds we'd watch the bruised, sullen skies, wondering what the heavens carried for us. We knew well what we wished for. We looked forward to what a heavy snowfall would mean. Snow. If it fell all night and the newly-laid white carpet froze fast to the scabbed grey ground we'd run to the back door first thing in the morning howling to our beloved whiskey-breath parents, "Let us in, Let us in."

Quite often they would, softyhearts the pair of them. Somebody had to clean that chimney and it might as well be us, they would say, even if it meant getting our handsome shellsuits a little dirtier and our urchin faces a little blacker. Mam would look at me and tousle my hair and say I was like Michael Jackson in reverse. Then she'd send me out to moonwalk in the traffic, such as it was in those far-off days before speed bumps.

When we got older we lived, of course, in the manner which has become popular in this Celtic Tiger time, indoors.

There was a tradition in that time which I think has been forgotten now but it was harmless. A person would go to town and buy an item and later when they had it home they would take some trouble to disguise this item, usually in a paper covering of some sort, and they would leave it under a tree in the sitting room, whereupon a person who hadn't originally paid for the item would find it and take it away with them. They might later uncover this item and find, say, socks or The Twenty Five Greatest Irish Sporting Moments - How They Happened To Me, by Young Jimmy Magee and that person would be determined from then on to royally pay back the person who had left such a thing under the tree for them.

We were a talented family. Not just at the pickpocketing either. On really cold days we'd play the mouth organ and tap dance outside the local saloon bars. I remember it was Arctic cold one afternoon and the saliva on the little mouth organ actually froze the instrument to my sister's drooly lips. The weld was tight and inoperable but pluckily, my sister went on to become Brian Cowen.

We made the most of things back then.

Sometimes we would make the journey into town but generally those trips were more trouble than they were worth for us. Rounding up our horses from the long, narrow, black field known simply as "the motorway" would take an age.

Finding a place amidst the piling turmoil of Grafton Street to tether a piebald was tricky even in those days. Delving back into the snowdrifts of memory I suppose that in one way we were happy-go-lucky children but in another we certainly knew the meaning of woe. It meant the opposite of giddy-up.

The time I describe was a far-off era before even the Internet, a time when a man could make a half-decent living just by being able to remember useless pieces of information. You can well imagine the quality of life in those days when I tell you that we knew nothing of online credit fraud, pay-per-view porn sites or quick ways to enlarge private body parts within six weeks. Indeed fun had yet to be manufactured on a basis which would provide lucrative economies of scale. In those primitive days on the Northside, fun was a cottage industry, just something you made for yourself out of a sense of duty.

The Christmas I am remembering now concerns the time my uncle came home from America, where he had been living, like all Irish in that sepiad dream-time, in Hell's Kitchen amidst the colourful native transvestite and heroine addict communities.

To the new generation of the brightest and the best with their fancy college degrees and their sophisticated crack cocaine and cheese evenings it may seem laughably quaint but it was truly the dream of every Irish person back then to give their children the chances they themselves had never had, the opportunity to grow up in the idyllic, fulfilling atmosphere of used syringes and transgender childminding services and later to make lucratively sentimental films about it all.

Aids was just becoming popular and it was an exciting time just to be alive.

My own uncle had done well for himself there in Hell's Kitchen, making his mark with a full-blown addiction which, with typically spiky independence, he financed himself, doing things the hard way, by cold calling to people's homes and apartments.

Those were the days, indeed, when addicts didn't mind rolling up their sleeves. In recognition the American people finally paid for a trip home for my uncle. They said that when he left he took more with him than ever he had brought.

He came home one Sunday morning in his galoshes and his bowler hat wired with the fidgety energy of an Olympic swimmer. My father never trusted my uncle and once in a row which took place in drink he said that my uncle was lower than a Leeds United footballer.

Words like that can't be taken back easily but they must be quoted so that a man's Christmas fall-back emergency filler column looks a little like a sports column.

For peace my uncle locked himself in the garden shed and he was busy for a whole month. He rambled and roamed the whale-hump hills and the six-lane blacktops and went westwards, farther west than any of our tribe had been before. He went west as far as distant, fabled, Abbotstown.

Near Abbotstown, a holy place of virtual solitude, was a clearing wherein he was able to gather bits and pieces of wood and timber and lash them to a rudimentary contraption which he called a trolley. I suppose such a place of flotsam would not exist now but in that time they were many and they were called Woodies. My uncle said the growth in the area of Abbotstown was so lush and exotic that at times on his travels he couldn't see the Woodies for the trees.

And my uncle. When he returned at last we wouldn't see him for weeks. He became as preoccupied as a millionaire footballer on drug-test day. He would disappear into his shed and we would just hear him clanking and banging away, like a millionaire footballer.

Finally it was inevitably December and on a snowless Christmas Day he summoned us children toward his shed with a bony crook of his yellowed index finger.

"Fetch yer little piebalds," he commanded lovingly. We went and retrieved our horses from the hard shoulder. They thought we had forgotten them on Christmas Day and they were both wearing long faces. It was a time when joyriding was beginning to make the horse obsolete in Irish culture anyway, and there were no words which could cure the fatalistic outlook of either Bostik or Uhu.

When we returned with the animals my uncle had wheeled a handsome two-wheeled contraption from the shed. This was the fruit of his months' labours.

A small crowd had gathered.

"This your way of saying surrey?" asked my father acidly.

We children were unmoved by the undertones of adult bitterness and led our horses forward to be harnessed. Then with surprising alacrity for a man as big and supposedly as quick as coal slack my father jumped out and blocked our path.

"Careful kids," he bellowed, holding out his shovel hand as if to stop traffic, "it might be a trap."

That was how we lived our lives back then. Before fun or Sky Sports Super Sundays when we drank turnip wine and some of these jokes were young.