Anne Griffin, author
We’re all a bit nosy about what Christmas is like in other people’s houses - so we asked some local people to answer six questions about their Christmases:
1. Are you an organised shopper or a Christmas Eve gift-shopper?
2. Do you have any family Christmas traditions, or maybe ornaments that must go on the tree each year?
3. Who does the Christmas Day dinner in your house? What parts of the Christmas dinner are your favourite?
4. How do you spend Christmas afternoon?
5. What is you r best Christmas memory?
6. What are your favourite Christmas films or songs?
1. Organised, without a doubt. However, my husband is not, so that makes for an interesting Christmas Eve. Most of my presents are bought at this stage. I started early and tried to shop locally as much as I could.
2. When we first moved to Mullingar in 2004, we were given a small wooden German Santa Claus who smokes a pipe. Every year we sit him by the telly and at some stage on Christmas Day we will light him up and let him puff away for a while.
3. After a near-enough year’s worth of making dinners, I get a well-earned break and my husband, formerly a chef, takes charge. It is our family’s favourite meal of the year, so there is big pressure on the man, but he has never once failed to impress. He makes the best stuffing in Ireland.
4. Mainly asleep in front of the fire after the fabulous dinner. We have all the good intentions of getting out and walking off the meal but somehow the couch trips us up and there we sit until we nod off.
5. As a kid I would so look forward to biting into the thin Dairy Milk bar from the Christmas selection box that Santa left me, for my breakfast. Naturally, it was the only time of the year my mother would countenance such a thing. To this day, I still do it, and I have put a lot of work into encouraging my son to continue this important family tradition.
6. I used to watch The Wizard of Oz every Christmas. I had this kind of love hate thing with it where I adored the cowardly lion but was very scared of the witches. But these days, once my Christmas tree is up, usually around the 8th, I watch the Gavin and Stacey Christmas Special and that’s it, Christmas has officially begun for me. And in terms of songs, I choose Greg Lake’s ‘I Believe in Father Christmas’.
Note from Anne
If you are stuck for what to get a reader for Christmas, you might consider Listening Still my latest novel. Set in a fictional midlands town, the local undertaker wonders how it is her life has ended up as it has, chatting to the clients, yep, the dead ones, and married to her childhood friend. But in trying to figure out her future, her past returns to stick a spanner in the works. An Irish bestseller, Graham Norton has called it ‘A wonderfully unexpected tale of love, death and everything in between’.
It is available in Just Books, Eason and Bookstation. Also available on e-book and audio (read by Nicola Coughlan, Derry Girls and Bridgerton).
Anne Griffin’s second novel, Listening Still was published during the summer. Her first novel, When All Is Said, topped the Irish book charts in 2019. The winner of the Newcomer of the Year Award at the Irish Book Awards in 2019, she was longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award 2021.