Joseph O’Connor
Flying Home for Christmas
Tinta regada
9 – enero de 2026
Something about air travel is still miraculous. This morning you awoke in tinselled New York, a city that loves Christmas like no other on Earth. The windows of the stores a delirium of neon; Christmas trees, heavy with shaggy dignity. Carollers on the corner by the Puerto Rican deli, singing “Silent Night” in doo-wop Spanish and clicking their fingers to the beat. You made your way out to JFK Airport, feeling weary and excited, two sensations that rarely go together anyplace else, but which in New York are inseparable, perpetually wrestling kin, wrangling like Homer and Bart. Now you’re sleepless on an aircraft, breasting through the darkness. At dawn, you’ll be home in Ireland.
AT DAWN YOU’LL BE HOME IN IRELAND.
ONE NIGHT TO COMPLETE A JOURNEY
THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN UNIMAGINABLE
TO YOUR ANCESTORS.One night to complete a journey that would have been unimaginable to your ancestors. All those millions who crossed the tempests to the land of sweet liberty and never saw their townland again. You’ve heard them sung-about in bars in Queens and the Bronx, seen their photographs on Ellis Island, in museums of emigration, adorning hoardings at airports back home. On St Patrick’s Night you were watching the TV news with your roommate before heading out to a party in the East Village, when a little girl appeared on the screen at the Manhattan parade, the words “Irish Great-Grandfather” on her sweatshirt. To see the name of your country filled you with strange longing. How must they have felt, all the millions who sailed away? What would they make of Skype?
Below you now are the ice-floes of Newfoundland and Gander, an ocean of moonlit memories. Time-zones of altitude melt. In your mind, you walk the blocks and avenues you’re leaving behind. You see the geysers of steam rising up from the subway, the yellow cabs scuttling, the shoppers in the rain, the Empire State Building on a misty Halloween night illuminated in gauze of aquamarine and gold amid the alleluia of NYPD sirens. People think they know New York from the movies and TV, and they do – but no screen yet invented can give you its riot of aromas: hot-dog vendors frying onions, wet earth in Central Park, the perfumes of an expensive makeup store on Fifth Avenue and Broadway, into which, on a boiling day, you wandered in the hope of intense air-conditioning, and saw, in the corner, Madonna, buying a lipstick.
HOW MUST THEY HAVE
FELT, ALL THE MILLIONS
WHO SAILED AWAY?
WHAT WOULD THEY HAVE
MADE OF SKYPE?You’ve come to love this loud and electrified city whose souvenir T-shirts are embossed with a vivid, scarlet heart. You love its jazziness, its courage, the braggadocio of its talk, its almost violent sense of its own superiority to everywhere else on the planet. The loveliness of its Sunday morning sleepiness. They talk like Al Pacino. They rhyme like Cole Porter. You ❤️ it. But it isn’t home.
The tailwinds are behind you. Your folks in Ireland are asleep. But in an hour or two, they’ll be awakening, setting out for the airport. You can almost see their faces, waiting for you in Arrivals. You hope you won’t weep for joy. New Yorkers wave their emotions like flags made of wow, but it isn’t how Irish families are wired. We’re reserved, more subtle, taking refuge in slagging. We’re fluent in irony, saying the things we need to say by talking about something else. The only time your dad ever said the words “I love you”, the two of you were watching Riverdance on Broadway late one night on the TV. The whole house was silent. Everyone else had gone to bed. He’d made sandwiches from yesterday’s roast beef and opened a pricey bottle of wine someone from the office had given him on his retirement. There was a slow, lyrical melody of uilleann pipes and heartbreaking low whistle, chiming with the cough of the central heating system as it puffed and went rustily to sleep.
“You’re fantastic,” he said quietly. “I love you to bits.”
“God, thanks, Dad,” you said, astonished. “I love you, too.”
“I was talking to Michael Flatley,” he said.
They wept the day you left. They didn’t want to see you go but they understood they would have to let you. Your sister crumpling into silent tears as you kissed her hair, your father holding onto your shoulders and gazing into your eyes as though trying to photograph them with his own. “It’s only New York,” he murmured, as if trying to persuade himself. “It’s not like you’re going to the moon.”
The announcement calling your flight. How hard to turn and go. Your brother texted you from the car to say “b-have over there. luv ya.” You could never bring yourself to erase that text. There were nights in New York when you were lonesome with the blues, before the city opened up to you and permitted you the gift of its friendship, a thing it takes time before doing. You’d switch on your mobile and scroll through the texts, until you found that message, glowing in the blue, and you wept in the room to which fate and courage had brought you, a room in a city of 50 million rooms, each of them containing a story. He’d slag you to death if he ever found out. Your unquestioningly loyal, endlessly sarcastic, fiercely sweet kid brother. Maybe he’ll come to New York himself. The way things are looking in Ireland, he might have to.
But it’s Christmas, not the time to be thinking about recession. There’ll be time enough for the worries of tomorrow. The plane banks heavily, you’re above the world of reality but you can smell your mother’s cake. She’ll have baked it last week, from her own mother’s recipe. You remember, as a child, the fervent joy of assisting her, your soup spoon stirring the luscious mounds of sultanas and Jamaican brown sugar. Gay Byrne on the radio playing “Oh, Holy Night”. The specialness of being alone in the kitchen with your mother, the lights on the Christmas tree blinking. She’d brew a pot of strong tea and inhale a cup of it before sipping, and you’d wait for the oven to heat.
“You’re my pet,” she’d say softly, touching your hair. “You’re after being a great help to me this morning.” One Christmas your aunt came home from Chicago and you wrote her name out in icing. She gave you twenty dollars as a present.
THEY TALK LIKE AL PACINO.
THEY RHYME LIKE COLE PORTER.
YOU ❤️ IT. BUT IT ISN’T HOME.The flight is jammed to the rafters. Sleepy couples, frantic children, a few solitary older people who look celestially content as they recline. There’s a Christmas movie on the in-flight screens but you couldn’t get into it. You’re imagining midnight Mass in the church where you made your First Communion; the walk home afterwards through the streets of your town, past the chippers and the pubs and the shuttered-up shops, counting all the candles in the windows of the houses. The scene is like a snow globe you shake from your childhood: the smell of sausages and bacon at one in the morning; the adults a little merry or talking of the past; the children up to ninety with excitement. Then the flickers of sleep, dreams of camels crossing deserts. The year Santa brought the Chopper bicycle for which you had beseeched, your father taking photographs of the snow. Watching the Christmas Day edition of Top of the Pops. Band Aid’s “Feed the World”. Slade and Alvin Stardust. Shane McGowan and Kirsty MacColl singing “Fairytale of New York”. Mud singing “Lonely This Christmas”. Eternities of gift-wrap and silver rosettes. Sticking your thumb into a bowl of cranberry sauce for a lingering, lascivious lick.
A memory of your first morning as a New Yorker arises like a movie. You were jetlagged, exhausted, unprepared for the heat. Raw with the emotion of leaving. There was maybe someone at home with whom you were slightly in love; it had hurt you to leave with so many feelings unvoiced and you wondered if you’d been right to stay silent. But the consoling exhilaration of Manhattan seemed to swoop from the skyscrapers, enfolding you in its gritty seduction. Kids shooting hoops in the basketball court on Mott Street and models being snapped on West Houston. You went into the Waverley Diner on Sixth Avenue and ordered a coffee. In this city of a hundred varieties of absolutely everything, that had proved more difficult than you’d reckoned. You were thinking of Bob Dylan, how he walked these shimmering streets, of Lou Reed and Patti Smith and Liam Clancy and Dylan Thomas, and your aunt, before she moved to Chicago. Debbie Harry had strolled that avenue with Joey Ramone and Johnny Thunders, blowing kisses to the sultry nights that produced her. David Byrne and Talking Heads had played gigs on this block. There were kids in the booths wearing NYU tank-tops but they hadn’t bought them in your town’s Dunnes Stores. In your bedroom back in Ireland, you had listened to New York, felt the lightning storms of its optimism and its rage and its attitood, its cassettes unspooling wildly in your teenage fingers because you played them to bits and shreds. This was the city of your adolescence, though you’d never seen it in the flesh, never breathed its heady amalgamation of diesel fumes and hope. Now, you were here. You asked the waitress if you could have an egg.
She said, “Baby, this is Noo Yawk. You can have anything you want. Over-easy or scrambled or boiled or poached or sunny-sideup? What you need?”
You flick on the in-flight map as the captain announces you are entering Irish airspace. “Nearly home. Thanks for flying with us. Happy Christmas.” The cabin lights are turned on. Weary passengers yawn. Below you are the tiny coastal islands of Kerry, ink blots splashed by a careless cartographer who didn’t know the miracle he was mapping.
It’s early morning in Ireland. They’ll be leaving the house around now, setting out in the car for the airport. The road will be quiet, illuminated by their silence. Your mother will have made sandwiches for the journey. New York is still asleep, if it ever really sleeps. The garbage trucks will be inching through Hell’s Kitchen and Alphabet City, devouring the mounds of overfilled rubbish sacks and ripped, abandoned sofas. Snow might be falling on the dreams of Manhattan. How beautiful, to see the snow in Tompkins Square Park, falling softly into the canyons of Times Square and Columbus Circle, over lovers wending home, over disappointed heroes, over cops wintering out in high-viz tunics. Snow settling like a confetti of possibility and peace over the Bethlehem of the Central Park Zoo.
The joy is fierce. You’re coming home for Christmas. It fills your emigrant ❤️.
