In many ways a Manx farm Christmas is not only very similar to how it was in times gone by but also very similar to any other day of the year. There are still animals to feed, cows to be milked: that doesn’t stop just because it’s a holiday.

Christmas at Moorhouse Farm in Gansey begins on Christmas Eve when the Costain family put on their much-loved Nativity event, Ballabethlehem.

It will be the first time they have been able to put on the show since before Covid and it means that Paul Costain and his partner, Sally-Ann Maiden, will start Christmas morning tidying up after the night before.

Sally-Ann says: ‘We also have all our usual livestock to feed: the beef cattle in the sheds and the sheep down in the fields.

‘We take hay, feed and minerals to them and, if it’s very cold, we break the ice on the water troughs.

‘We’re usually two and a half to three hours doing this.

‘For our Christmas dinner we don’t tend to have a turkey: we have beef, usually our own. And I’m hopefully going to the Mart on the 23rd for the Annual Poultry Sale and I’m going to get a goose.

‘There will be me and Paul and two of my children, Millie and Daniel, and this year my brother, sister-in-law and their children are coming. They live in Ramsey and two of them are vegetarians so they won’t have the goose or beef.

‘After our meal what we’ll do, if it’s a nice day, we’ll go out and we’ll check the rest of the stock and the whole family will go and have a walk round the fields.’

We buy Manx produce wherever we can: we get our milk from Cooils cream from Cooils, we get our potatoes from the Spud Shed at Billown, and Manx cheeses, so anything that we can buy Manx we always do, that goes throughout the whole year, it’s not just Christmas.’

For the Qualtrough and Quayle families at Glenlough it will be ‘very quiet this year - just 26 of us!’, says Will Qualtrough.

Will and his wife, Janette, and their four children will be getting together with Janette’s parents and her three brothers and their families.

They will all sit down for Christmas dinner together at elder brother Richard’s house.

Will says: ‘There will also be one or two people who live in the close vicinity who have no families so we will invite them too.

‘Our middle daughter, Isabel, who is 16, has reared 10 to 12 turkeys each year for the last four years, proper Manx free range birds, so we will be having one of those.

‘We have an open house on Christmas Eve and my mum stays the night and we open our presents on Christmas morning.’

As well as Isabel, Will and Janette, they also have Alfie who is 19, Faye, 17 and Ruby, 11, so the present opening is ‘chaos’.

Will says: ‘Then we will all migrate up the lane in our Christmas jumpers to Richard’s house for dinner.

‘After the meal we’ll play all those Christmas party games that make you cringe.’

And when it comes to doing all the usual chores on Christmas Day, Will says: ‘Although it’s Christmas Day it’s somehow easier doing them and you can spend a bit more time.

‘Normally, as well as those daily tasks there’s a list of things you set yourself to achieve that day but on Christmas Day the only jobs are to feed and check and bed up [the animals]. You can take a bit more time and I enjoy it.’