Travelling for Christmas can be stressful, hectic and downright disappointing – but as Zack Cahill recalls in his latest The Layover column, a festive journey also holds the potential for lifelong memories. And some trips might even make you believe… not just in Santa.
When I started this column, I thought about the times I travelled for Christmas. It should be easy, I thought. I went to Sydney for one year. Here’s the thing about Australia: it is exactly what you think it is. There’s none of that “Oh, once you get off the beaten track, India is so much more than the clichés”. No. Australia is the cliché and it doesn’t give a shit. That’s all it wants to be. Christmas in Australia is just barbecues and Santa hats on the beach. It’s red bikinis and sunburn. It’s a guy in flip-flops poking a steak with a spatula and calling things “ripper”, forever. It is the first thing an AI program would spit out. I’m not getting a whole column out of that.
But then it all came flooding back. An experience I had memory-holed for thirty years was staring me right in the face: the time I met Santa Claus.
I was a sickly child forever frightening the crap out of my parents. I had severe asthma and a host of other maladies (now largely well-controlled). But compared to my sister Lily, I was a Jane Fonda vision of robust health. Lily didn’t mess around with a sniffle or a temperature, she would turn blue and hit the deck: my young dad running out into our street with her in his arms, calling for a neighbour to drive them to the hospital, her blue limbs flopping around limply.
On top of asthma, severe skin issues and allergies, her lungs would close up as a result of an unexpected splash of water to the face. I remember seeing her hospital records (actual, physical paper back then). A normal person’s, yours, would be a few neat sheafs of paper. Hers was a phone book.
Anyway, we spent a lot of time in and out of Harcourt Street Children’s Hospital in Dublin’s city centre. Sometimes we’d be in at the same time for different things, and they’d put us in beds next to each other. The first time that happened, Lily took me on a walking tour of the hospital, introducing me to shopkeepers, nurses and porters. She was businesslike, channelling a harried middle manager showing a new recruit the ropes.
Just before that hospital was demolished in the nineties, they let her in to look around one last time, walking the empty wards she’d spent so much of her childhood in, surreal and melancholic without the beeping machines and rattling trolleys and raging hustle bustle of a working hospital. She took the sign for the X-ray room off a wall. It hung in her bedroom for years.
Anyway, one day we and about fifteen other kids from the hospital were invited to Finnish Lapland. We both took this completely in our stride, but I see now it was a 1980s Irish version of when they arrange for a wrestler or superhero to meet some poor sick child. “Let’s give these miserable waifs a glimpse of holiday cheer before their lungs finally pack”. Of course, the joke’s on them, we survived.
I remember the bitter December cold, meeting the group at six o’clock in the morning in Dublin, with breath misting the air as we waited for the coach and screamed all the way to the airport.
We’d never been on a plane before and the excitement made the blood fizz in my veins. We listened to the safety announcement for the first time with rapt attention, the earth-rattling roar of the engines slamming us back in our seats.
Then Lapland. I’m sure if I saw it now it would appear cheesy or fake. I’d see the seams. But we were just the right age for it to be magical, not quite old enough to have stopped believing. It was a Christmas card come to life, perfect white snow – another first for us – and pine lodges and trees and lights. We had a husky ride, piling into the sledge under thick fur blankets while the dogs yapped and yelped, anxious to go. When they got the word they were off like lightning, our faces burning with the cold as we tore along, swinging around tight corners.
Then we met the man himself, not some knock-off supermarket Santa, who all children kind of understand is more of a representative. This was the real deal, with an impressively ornate costume and a proper beard.
We were there and back the same day, arriving in Dublin at the drop-off point where our parents had left us that morning, but feeling like we’d been gone a week.
When I think of Christmas travel I think of that trip. But there were others. When snow paralysed the London airports in 2008, I squeezed onto a train to Holyhead with 500 other committed Irish emigres. standing room only and everyone drinking heavily. Imagine it. A constant slew of piss-filled Paddies contorting past each other on the way to the toilet. Not an atom of space between us. Booze and sweat and endless songs in the air. Hours of this. The scene on the ferry itself was like the last days of Rome.
Years later, a trip to Vietnam. Christmas Day in Hoi An made for a beautifully surreal experience. I was there with a friend, but on that trip, we got together. Today, she’s my wife.
And there was the Christmas we couldn’t travel at all. Flights were cancelled due to the pandemic. I remember speaking to my family over Zoom. Lily, 38 then and healthy, was no longer in and out of hospital. My mum and dad. They’d divorced years ago, but when my dad got cancer my mum moved him back into the family home to look after him. That would be his last Christmas. He looked content surrounded by the women he loved, in the stupid furry hat he’d taken to wearing constantly.
When I was a kid and admitted to my mum that I didn’t believe in Santa anymore, my dad came and found me and said he was disappointed, because he himself still believed. He argued that if a man lived in enough people’s minds, as vividly as Santa Claus, then surely he was as real as any flesh-and-blood man.
I think of that moment a lot as I get ready to travel home again. I wish I’d been there with him that final Christmas. I wish he were here now. But I keep him in my head as always, believing in him vividly.
Illustration by Martin Perry, photography via Unsplash
