(The doubly recycled Christmas Tree from Paris, last year)

It’s Christmas Eve! Just saw a huge seagull flying over our house. Even though we live near the sea they don’t fly over our house very often. I think it means “storms ahead” when they do. Anyway, I was thinking, the seagull doesn’t know it’s Christmas Eve. She doesn’t know today is any different to any other day, except maybe for her internal storm warning…. She’s not worrying about tomorrow’s dinner, about the table decorations, about the perfect gift or the perfectly thoughtful email she forgot to write… She has no worries about the future.

(… and a real Christmas Tree)

The seagull flying over our house is called Eve. Well to be exact she’s not flying over our house now, now she’s getting closer to her safe place… and her full name is Christmas Eve but she likes Eve better. She flies off to her safe place whenever she gets the message there’s going to be a storm. Then she stays there until she gets the message the storm is over. At every other time she fishes with her friends off the rocks in Greystones. There’s always enough fish for today so Eve has always been very content to carry on as if there will always be enough fish every day.

(Santa Clause getting ready to round-up the little reindeer…)

She has almost arrived at her safe place, it’s miles inland by the side of a lake. Years ago when she was a small seagull she got a message to follow the other, older gulls. She was so young she thought it might be a little holiday and she was very happy to follow them. But it wasn’t a holiday, there were lots of other seagulls jostling for a place near the lake and Eve got shouted at a few times. She couldn’t wait to get back to the rocks by the sea. Nevertheless, after that whenever she got the message there was going to be a storm she flew to the lake.

(Candle in the window… Happy Christmas everyone!)

As she got older and bigger Eve didn’t get jostled so much and when she found a spot near the lake no one tried to move her along. Nowadays she’s one of the strongest seagulls by the lake and she sometimes wonders if she really needs to leave the rocks in a storm. Maybe someday she won’t leave but today she’s on her way to the lake heeding the message. What if humans had an internal message system? What if they learned how to hear it?

What if they began listened to it? Mairead.