Christmas in Monaghan
Christmas in Monaghan is a town Christmas rather than a destination one. Nobody drives here for it. What the town does have is a lights switch on that most of the county turns up to, a street food festival in December, a pantomime, and a fortnight in which the centre is busier than at any other time of the year. If you live within half an hour of the town, that is enough.
The lights switch on
The town centre lights are switched on at an event in the second half of November, usually on a Sunday afternoon and usually in the squares. There is live music, a bit of dancing, and Santa generally appears. It runs for a couple of hours and it is free.
The other towns in the county do their own on different evenings across the same two or three weeks, so Clones, Castleblayney, Carrickmacross and Ballybay each get a night. They are staggered deliberately enough that you could go to several, though after the second one you have seen the format.
Dates move every year. The county council and Monaghan Tourism publish the list once it is fixed.
The street food festival and the markets
The Taste of Monaghan street food festival runs a Christmas edition, normally on a Saturday in early December, filling the street from Church Square down to the Diamond with food stalls and trucks. It is free to walk through. The same organisers run a much larger version of it in August, and the Christmas one is the smaller and colder sibling, but it is the closest thing the town has to a Christmas market.
A craft market has run in the Market House through the first three weeks of December, selling work by local makers, which is the sensible answer if you want a present that did not come from a shopping centre.
Around the county there are Christmas markets and fairs through late November and early December, at Glaslough, at Lough Muckno in Castleblayney, at Ballybay and in several of the smaller parishes. Clones parish runs a Christmas tree festival with dozens of trees decorated by local schools, businesses and groups, and choirs singing between them. All of these are weekend events over one or two days, so they are easy to miss.
Shopping
Monaghan town centre shops extend their hours in the run up to Christmas, but that is down to each shop rather than an organised late night shopping night, so check the individual place rather than assuming. The town centre and the shopping centre both get genuinely busy on the last two Saturdays.
Being fifteen kilometres from the border, a lot of Monaghan people do part of their Christmas shopping in the North, and whether that is worth doing depends entirely on the exchange rate that year. There is more on that in shopping across the border.
The pantomime and what is on
Monaghan Dramatic Society stage a pantomime at the Garage Theatre on the Armagh Road. It is a proper local pantomime with a local cast, it sells to families from across the county, and the good nights go early. The theatre also programmes Christmas films, music and family shows through December, and the programme goes up on its own site well in advance.
Church services
St Macartan’s Cathedral on the Clones road is the main Catholic church in the town and holds the usual round of carol services, confessions and Christmas Masses, including a vigil on Christmas Eve. St Patrick’s Church of Ireland in Church Square runs its own carol service and Christmas services. Both publish times in the parish notices and on their noticeboards a week or two beforehand, and neither the times nor the pattern are the same every year, so check locally rather than turning up on spec.
What is open and what is shut
Christmas Day closes the town. Shops, pubs and restaurants are all shut, buses do not run, and the only things open are a garage forecourt or two. Plan for it, because there is no fallback.
St Stephen’s Day is mostly shut as well, with the hotels the main exception, and bus services run a holiday timetable through to the new year. Between St Stephen’s Day and New Year most shops reopen but on shorter hours, and a fair number of the smaller independents simply close for the week. Hotel restaurants are the most reliable thing over that stretch, and even they will want a booking. There is more on the town’s food in eating out.
Rossmore Forest Park and the walks around the town are open and free the whole way through, and they are where half the county goes on Stephen’s Day to walk off the dinner. For the rest of what there is, see things to do.
None of the dates above are fixed. Events move, get cancelled and get added. Check before you travel.
Details on this page last checked . If something here is out of date, it probably is our fault rather than yours.