Mum just loved this song. I always thought it was ‘O Mio Bambino Caro’ and it was about a baby, but apparently it’s about a lover and how the songstress would throw herself off a bridge if her love was unrequited. It’s a very passionate song, and a beautiful rendition here by Montserrat Caballé.
When Mum was in hospital we brought in a CD player and I remember this song ringing out of Mum’s room. It has made me have mixed emotions about it, but maybe that’s the essence of good music.
Mum was an advertiser’s dream viewer, as soon as a new product came on TV we knew it would be in our kitchen by the end of the week. It wasn’t expensive appliances or gadgets, but rather the latest all purpose cleaner, washing scourer or dishcloth. Our kitchen was a marketeer’s dream boat.
I came home one day and Mum had bought a mop off a door-to-door salesman. This was in the 1990s, I had always thought the doorstep mop business had dried up decades earlier. There must have been more than my Mum out there buying kitchen goods in droves but I never came across one.
Needless to say, I’ve been infected with the purchasing bug and end up with plenty of magic carpet shoe cleaners and novelty dish cleaning items in my own kitchen!
Mum loved clothes, she loved handbags, earrings and all accessories (a love which I happily inherited). Mum was advocate extraordinaire for charity clothes shops and I believe it was Mum who kept most of those shops in our local area going. Anytime I’d compliment a bag or coat of Mum’s her reaction was always the same “two pounds fifty in Enable Ireland.” Mum also shopped on the high street but I think the satisfaction that came with finding such bargains was what kept Mum going back to the charity shops again and again.
When Mum died and I had the unenviable task of sorting out all her clothing. Like many post-death duties it became a task that had to be completed, and in order to do that the emotional aspect had to be ignored in the immediacy. It turned into a really rewarding experience as Mum’s clothes came full circle by going straight back to Enable Ireland or to the ladies she had worked with through St Vincent dePaul.
After Mum died a lot of people said to me ‘Christmas will be hard.’ There is a kind of expectation that things won’t be the same after someone has died, whereas in fact I felt like the spirit of Christmas encapsulated everything that Mum was about.
Christmas for me is about family, giving, doing nothing and on a more practical note eating and drinking to excess. Who can’t love this time of year! Mum really went all out at Christmas, when we were growing up Mum went out of her way to foster the magical Christmas feeling. Christmas was a day of Santa, surprises and stockings at the end of your bed. Luckily for us Santa never got sick of buying stocking fillers and so I managed to get a stocking well into my 20s, still filled with fluffy pens and funny glasses!
Mum had a great habit, which all of us have inherited to varying degrees, of rubbing her hands together with excitement. Christmas involved a lot of hand rubbing in our house. Every aspect of the day was celebrated from breakfast to the aperitif, to dinner and finally the chocolates at the end of the night.
Christmas is about tradition, but for us this is about an ever changing tradition. It’s now based in my sister’s house where we all delight in her three children’s reaction to Santa’s gifts, while we have another Christmas again a few days after when joined by our eldest brother and his family. Rather than missing Mum’s presence, I feel like Mum’s spirit is in every single aspect of the day.
Roll on December 25th!
