When people learn I have 10 siblings, a predictable litany of responses follow. ‘Catholic parents, I take it?’ has proved popular in London and, while not particularly funny, it is annoyingly accurate. Back home, where Catholic parentage is roughly as exotic as blue jeans, the responses are more ribald, usually making insinuations about their obvious lack of other hobbies. Again, not hilarious but, one concedes, not inaccurate either.
On the other end of the scale, a pleasingly large number of people ask, in full sincerity, whether I know all their names. My reply to this is always, ‘Well, there are a couple I never did catch, but it’s been so long now it feels awkward to bring it up.’
Not far off the top of that list of responses is ‘what’s Christmas like in your house?’, the inflection of which tells you a lot about that person’s feelings about the season, or their family. To some, spending the festive period with triple the number of siblings would be torture; another eight people unimpressed by you passing off popular tweets as your own jokes; a basketball squad’s worth of questions about the new thing you’ve done with your hair.
I get on with my siblings, and that new thing I’ve done with my hair looks stunning, so I love seeing everyone at Christmas. When we were young, it was a time of near incalculable joy, and greatly enhanced by the number of bowlcut-sporting playmates with whom we shared it.
My wife and I are pretty happy we aren’t going to have 11 kids - we have so many hobbies, after all - but this is one of the few things I’m sad my son will miss out on. The gargantuan dinner, the frenzy of gift-giving, every room in the house filled with pockets of people watching movies, eating more food, or attempting to play together with touchingly ill-matched presents; my brother testing if my Stretch Armstrong’s legs could extend long enough to fit his Neville Southall shinpads; my sister officiating a wedding for her Cindy doll and its one true love, a stack of Roald Dahl books with a slinky for a head.
Nowadays, we no longer spend Christmas together. We’ve moved away and accumulated partners and kids, meaning our immediate family now tops out at 36. We simply can’t fit in my dad’s house. Instead, we meet in mid-December at my brother’s, where he and my sister-in-law host us with dinner, crackers, booze, and me passing off things I’ve read on Twitter as my own jokes.
And, this will be the first time our son will see all of his cousins in one place. If he can cope with the trauma of seeing 14 mirror versions of himself at various ages, then parenting will have been worth the trade-off that we can no longer get raucously drunk. Hell, I might even finally learn all their names.
Follow Séamas on Twitter @shockproofbeats
