She released her grip on the walking frame and sat on the settee. Madge, now in her eighty-fifth year was ready to write her Christmas cards. She had Hospice cards, Mouth and Foot painter’s cards and cards for all sorts of good causes. She took out her notebook of 50 years, the one with all the names and addresses.

“She’s dead, he’s dead, she’s dead, he’s dead, God is there anyone left?” Madge whispered. Eventually she found some relative in Artane and another on the Navan Road.

Well that’s two cards sorted, she laughed to herself. Eighty-five years brings more than old age, it brings a notebook with a list that reads like the obituary column of the Evening Herald.
Madge perused the notebook once more and found a few more relatives still in the land of the living. In 1955 Madge had a list of forty people who would receive Christmas cards. This Christmas, eight cards would suffice.

Jordan and Chloe don’t send Christmas cards. They don’t have a notebook of names, names that diminish by the year. “Were not into Christmas cards, it’s not cool,” says Chloe. “We text each other instead.”

Jordan and Chloe know what they ‘want’ for Christmas. “I’m getting a new LCD television with DVD recorder,” said Jordan. “And I’m getting a new laptop with DVD rewriter and burner and an optical mouse,” said Chloe.

Ten year old Muktar on the streets of Calcutta knows what he ‘needs’. A bowl of rice and a pitcher of water, and he’ll be lucky. He vaguely remembers Mother Theresa, the old lady with the white headdress and a kindness he’d never known before.

There’s few in this world that would take a dirty, bedraggled child under their wing. She did. And now he hears stories but he doesn’t understand. Some people are saying she was wrong to have views, convictions others call them, on certain matters. Anyway she told him about the infant in the stable at Christmas and how ‘He’ had come to save the world.

Jason is a computer graphics manager and he and his girl friend Patty have pots of money. Jason has bought Patty a real big Christmas pressie with his SSIA.

It’s a surprise, but he’s burstin’ to tell her about the new apartment in Croatia overlooking the coast. He hopes that she’ll like it, but she’s a bit fussy. Anyway, he can always change it for Bulgaria, that’s what the agent said.

Patty thought she’d push the boat out this Christmas, so she bought Jason a pressie with her SSIA. It’s a surprise– a new apartment in Croatia overlooking the coast. Well, Christmas morning should be a barrel of laughs. I hope they don’t start whinging about ‘negative equity’ and all that stuff.

Miss Bodkin– she never took to the ‘Ms’ bit– has her eye on a big bullock. Then again maybe a cow or a goat might do the trick. She read about the suggestion that people purchase a cow or a goat, or a few hens, no less, and then send them off to Africa or Asia or wherever a bullock might come in handy. And so she did, two bullocks for Mogadishu from ‘Miss’ Bodkin, and a happy Christmas to you all.