The excitement about the Christmas Fete in school - dad called it 'a fete worse than death', which went right over my head for ages. Mum made a box of little handcrafted items to sell every year. Still have a little mouse pin that my Dsis bought one year. Mum often made Santa gifts for us too - little stuffed animals and dolls.
Mum donning a HMQ style headscarf and her Jackie O lookalike sunglasses in late October, and thus disguised heading for the pub in broad daylight when none of the regulars would be out of bed yet, let alone propped up at the bar, to buy a few bottles of stout for the puddings. Scuttling off home as fast as she could lest anyone would see her. It was considered a bit disgraceful for responsible mothers to enter that particular licensed premises.
We three girls aged 12, 10 and 8 buying a Christmas tree at the local building supply place one year and carrying it home through the village, surprising mum and dad. Blobs of resin all over our clothes and in our hair, and the lovely smell of fresh fir.
Making or buying little gifts for each other as teens very short of cash. Among other places, we shopped in an Indian-boho mecca called Shree, and in a little bead shop in Crown Alley in Temple Bar, called Crown Jewels - this was way back when it was all fields around Temple Bar 
Going to visit relatives bearing gifts of bottles of wine and boxes of mince pies made by mum, and relatives visiting us with more plonk, and chocolates, and boxes of tangerines. The smell of an uncle's pipe smoke, and the smell of Bewley's coffee and freshly baked rolls in one particular house. Gifts arriving in the post from godparents. One year we got a box of chocolates from the Red October chocolate factory in Moscow from a dear family friend who had just returned from a visit to the USSR. Turning the box around and upside down to see if we could read the words on it.
Turning off all the lights in the sitting room except the tree lights, and dancing around.
One year I found Santa's secret stash and was sitting on the floor reading a Christmas book intended for me when Santa herself caught me and left me in no doubt about her dismay - the only time I ever heard my mother swear 
We got a fresh turkey from mum's sister a little before Christmas every year, and it hung in the shed for a few days before being prepared for roasting - it was a bit of a shock to open the shed door and find that waiting for you. Mum always had to clean it out and finish up plucking a few little feather stumps on Christmas Eve, a job she hated with a passion, but the turkey was a triumph of mind over matter every year. Mum outdid herself with Christmas dinner and all the traditional desserts. Dad carved so neatly, beginning with a ceremonial sharpening of the carving knife while we watched in great anticipation.
I remember that feeling that I couldn't possibly eat another thing, then raiding the kitchen later to fend off starvation. The late evening cup of tea, turkey and ham sandwich and Christmas cake was always so nice. One Christmas we went to my grandmother's house in the country, and we had a blazing plum pudding complete with charred holly sprig. It was like a scene from Dickens, with a roaring fire, gleaming table, an old Georgian dining room with window shutters, frost on the orchard outside. My grandmother's last Christmas. She was tiny and frail, smiling around at us all.