Scrubbing the tops of the cupboards in the kitchen a week the seasonal frolic.
I become aware that I'd begun the task without saying my customary Haily Mary for safety in the work.
I got down from the chair and said the prayer.
Then I remounted the chair and resumed cleaning the cupboard tops of various accruals of detritus not the most pleasant of which were the sundry depositions of parrot pooh.
I'm not superstitious and I know the BVM isn't wilfully threatening me to say prayers or else she'll let the devil knock me off the chair.
Still, a fall would have rightly marmelised me.
And prayers are answered.
So no harm invoking her protection before tasks like this.
As I worked I got to wondering would I get any presents this year.
I wasn't feeling particularly optimistic.
The glory days are long past.
Well the verdict is in.
By the end of the Yuletide season I had gotten five rather distinctive presents.
Five really nifty Xmas gifts.
A few days before Christmas a man called Reggie Baines breezed up to me in a street in Galway city.
He greeted me by name and regaled me with a few seasonal conversational sallies.
Then he breezed off again.
He was jaunty, happy and carefree, full of the joys of the season.
I was quite dumbfounded.
"Lord you will give me no better Christmas present than that," I told the creator of the universe.
For the man is painfully shy and much wounded by life. I've met him off and on for the past five years and occasionally tried to encourage him. He has never once had the confidence to greet me, let alone strike up a conversation.
The whole thing was quite unprecedented.
On Christmas eve, after I fed the swans n crows n water hens n dux at the lakes, X the big Papa swan stayed with me at the picnic table for about half an hour.
It was as if he was giving me a very personal swan's blessing worth a million dollars in spiritual currency.
Later on Christmas Eve a neighbour's child called to the chateau and triumphantly proffered a gingerbread biscuit coated in chocolate.
"I got this for you," she said with all the grandeur of a swan bestowing a million dollars.
At 11pm on Christmas Eve I brought the doggies outside.
I paused, struck by something strange.
It was a hush.
A blessed hush.
I thought: It's not just the quiet; I can hear cars from the street and more sounds from the hinterland.
I stood stock still and unhurriedly gauged the feeling.
It was as though the air was soft and rich with reverence and expectation. All the households round about. Children and adults waiting for Christmas. But not just these people. All the nation. All the world. Animals too somehow. And then the trees, the blessed trees, the grasses, the hedgerows and the fields and the forests and the mountains and the river and the sky.
That was the hush.
A hush of reverence in the creation for the coming of the Lord.
What a gift to experience it.
On Christmas Day the chair I was sitting on in the kitchen collapsed suddenly.
It was the same chair on which a week earlier I had been perching while cleaning the parrot pooh off the cupboard tops in the kitchen.
The fifth Yuletide present (ie the present being what didn't happen) was in its way quite quite marvellous too.
