Christmas

I don’t mind Xmas as it’s just me and my partner and he loves it too so in some ways it’s quite low-key. As long as the tree lights aren’t set to flash and everything is back in the loft on Boxing Day then I’m good.

In one way it’s strange, as in all the 21 years that I’ve lived here in Manchester, I always refer to Boxing Day as St. Stephen’s Day, which the day after Christmas is still referred to in Ireland and I always get puzzled looks from my English friends - we Irish have a tradition on St Stephen’s Day called the Wrenboys (only practiced in Rural Ireland now) where people dress up in various costumes and collect money for charity - in our local area, we also have the Ward Union Hunt, a fox hunting group (fox hunting is still legal in Ireland) - when I was growing up in the 1970’s in our local village, we had 5 working farms and at least 5 pubs, some of which doubled as grocery, drapery, hardware and petrol stations, which was normal in a typical Irish village - these days, the village is almost a suburb of Dublin 20 miles away and the farms are all gone and the pubs are standalone and only one of the hardware stores is left as a stand-alone but no longer serves petrol 

In one way it’s strange, as in all the 21 years that I’ve lived here in Manchester, I always refer to Boxing Day as St. Stephen’s Day, which the day after Christmas is still referred to in Ireland and I always get puzzled looks from my English friends - we Irish have a tradition on St Stephen’s Day called the Wrenboys (only practiced in Rural Ireland now) where people dress up in various costumes and collect money for charity - in our local area, we also have the Ward Union Hunt, a fox hunting group (fox hunting is still legal in Ireland) - when I was growing up in the 1970’s in our local village, we had 5 working farms and at least 5 pubs, some of which doubled as grocery, drapery, hardware and petrol stations, which was normal in a typical Irish village - these days, the village is almost a suburb of Dublin 20 miles away and the farms are all gone and the pubs are standalone and only one of the hardware stores is left as a stand-alone but no longer serves petrol