On December 1st Sunday Miscellany celebrated Christmas 2022 in a live concert at the National Concert Hall, with the RTÉ Concert Orchestra under the baton of conductor Gavin Maloney.
Readers on the night were Edel Coffey, Tim Carey, Rachael Hegarty, Declan Kiberd, Jackie Lynam, Kathleen MacMahon, John Toal and Paul Howard.
Special musical performances were from Connor McKeon, harpist Úna Walsh, singer Róisín O'Reilly and the contemporary trad group Trú.
And you can listen back to the first of these two programmes here -- Part 2 goes out Christmas morning, 9.02am.
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This is one of the stories featured on the night, in which writer Paul Howard recalls the Christmas Eve that featured a trip to the attic, a sieve, a bucket and Michael Bublé on loop.
"It was the start of December 2014. I was in the attic, taking down our very tasteful decorations – the rock and roll Rudolph who plays the drums and the geographically confused polar bear with the beret and lederhosen who sings Felice Navidad – when I became aware of a faint but persistent buzzing noise above my head. It turned out to be a fly. I remember thinking it was a bit unusual to see a fly at that time of year. What I discovered, over the course of the following hour, was that he was far from alone.
I continued taking down the decorations – the toilet seat cover of Santa's face and the Nativity snow globe that featured the baby Jesus being born in Bethlehem in the middle of a blizzard. Every time I returned to the attic, I noticed that there were more and more flies, buzzing around and slamming themselves against my face. By the time I’d taken the last of the decorations down – a Santa Claus who pulls down his trousers to show you his bum – there were forty or fifty of the things and I went downstairs to break the news to my wife that there was something dead in the attic.
An hour later, my nerves steeled thanks to a brandy large enough to disinfect a hospital, I climbed back up the ladder, then spent twenty minutes crawling around on my hands and knees, searching for what it still sickens me to describe as 'the host’."
