Susan Buckland: Christmas with hounds and horn

With Christmas looming I've been swapping tales with a couple of keen travelling friends about festive seasons spent away from home.

One friend described a colourful December 25 spent in Ruby Bay in the South Island with a group of happy hippies who lived in caravans and converted buses.

They had assembled their motor-drawn homes around a live pine tree which they had decorated to the nines. And when my friend and her partner showed up in their caravan, they were welcomed with open arms into an atmosphere redolent with good cheer and the aroma of wacky-backy.

In contrast to that summer Christmas with the flower children of the 21st century, the other friend described a traditional white Christmas in England with relations who plunged her into the spirit by showing her the brilliant Christmas lights in Bramley's toy shop and in Regent St in London. "Illuminations," they called them.

Then off they went to Blackpool, also famous for Christmas illuminations, before settling down to present opening, cracker popping and far too much turkey and Christmas pudding.

I then told of a memorable lead-up to Christmas spent in Armagh in Northern Ireland in the company of Ralph (pronounced Raf). The invitation to a festive season dinner and to stay the night had been generously issued to me and my four female travelling companions.

Ralph, who would have been a rake in his hey day, met us at his gentlemen's club, whisky in hand and the crystal decanter poised to prime us with Christmas cheer. The sun was several hours from going down over the yardarm "but who's counting?" beamed Ralph, for whom the timing of tipples did not appear to be an issue.

He led us round his venerable club, finally pointing out the bathroom. And omitting to warn those of us who entered this men's only domain about the toilet seat, a classical contraption which had been ingeniously designed for male use in the early 1900s to spring bolt upright when not required as a seat.

"Always catches the fillies on the way out, wot!" beamed Ralph, delighted that each of us had experienced the bottom-slapping toilet seat at close range. It was just one small example of the inventiveness of Armagh, he said. He had arranged a visit to a renowned Armagh invention, the Armagh Observatory, the oldest working research institution of its kind in Great Britain.

It was founded in 1790 by an archbishop, no less. Ralph, a former Irish horse guard and proud son of Armagh, made sure we understood that his city was the ecclesiastical centre of Ireland, the seat of the Protestant and Catholic archbishops and that St Patrick himself built his stone church on the hill above Armagh. Armagh was the centre of scholars and monasticism in Britain for more than 1000 years.

After the visit to the observatory Ralph drove us to his home, a rambling Georgian mansion surrounded by farm. There was barely time to slip into suitable finery before descending the stairs to the clink of the whisky decanter in the sitting room.

In various rooms en route I noticed antique furniture stashed in forgotten piles. In the rooms of the big old house that were still in use, works by famous painters hung on the walls. There were also photos of his mother's ancestral home, complete with an indoor training hall for the horses and a powder room where a pull of a cord released puffs of powder from a receptacle in the ceiling onto the wigs of the 17th-century gentlemen seated at the table below.

The dinner around Ralph's splendid Georgian dinner table, lit from above with sparkling chandeliers and warmed by a roaring fire, did not reach a hasty conclusion. Ralph kept popping corks off fine vintages and flirting shamelessly with five of us at the same time. "Haven't quite lost it," he would say as he bailed one or other of us up in a doorway and made a kind of primeval gurgling sound in his throat.

Finally, the night got the better of Ralph. He went to sleep in the great carver chair at the head of the table with his dogs draped over his feet.

The next morning Ralph treated his guests to a rude awakening. Resplendent in red hunting jacket, white breeches and black boots and hat, he threw open the door of each of our bedrooms and blew vigorously on a horn. For added effect, he clanged the handle of a strange looking instrument which he explained, with undisguised glee, was an antique sausage maker.

"Happy Christmas," cried the irrepressible Ralph, tripping over one of his dogs as he blew his born towards the next bedroom. "It's a great day for it, wot!"