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New year compositions in Dublin: fir beside Grafton Street's lilies
Grafton Street's family flower stalls, on the corners of Chatham, Harry and Duke streets, hold licences passed down within families, the Kellys' since the 1940s, and at Christmas their buckets are full of lilies. New Year compositions in Dublin work with a different winter material, noble fir dressed with berries, and the choice here starts with whether a piece travels in someone's hands or stays put on a table.
What Dublin's New Year range is built from: fir, berries, branches
The range brings fir in as a hand-tied bouquet or floral bag, a basket, a low table arrangement, a gift or an office set. Whatever shape it takes, the stems underneath are the same.
Noble fir carries the weight here, worked together with winterberry and pinecones. Nobody cuts down a whole tree for it: the wreaths and small trees are made from cut branches. Noble fir holds its needles better than most Christmas tree species, and its branches are stiff enough to bend into a ring, which is exactly why florists reach for it when the job is a wreath.
Christmas Day, St Stephen's Day and New Year's Day are public holidays in Ireland. The calendar and Dublin's winter weather are both covered on the Irish holidays and winter weather page.
Walking into someone's flat with flowers in hand calls for something that travels well. A hand-tied bouquet of fir works for that, and so does a basket, since a basket needs no vase: the stems already sit in their own base.
Other shapes are built to stay exactly where they land. A low table arrangement, a wreath for a door or a small branch tree belongs to one spot in a house and is not really meant to move again once it is set down: a sideboard, a hall table, the back of a front door. Choosing between hand-carried and table-bound New Year compositions in Dublin is mostly a question of where the piece will stand.
Winterberry, the small red fruit mixed through several of these pieces, makes people and pets sick if it is eaten, so where there are young children or animals about it is worth setting the piece a little out of reach. In winter, heating leaves Dublin flats dry, so keep it, and any vase nearby, away from a radiator too.
A cake with a cream greeting, or a set for every desk
A bento cake travels in the same order as the fir. It is a cake the size of a palm, boxed in cardboard, with a short line written straight onto the cream. It can be added alongside any of the New Year gifts. Cream does not sit well at room temperature for more than a couple of hours, so it is worth getting the cake into a cool spot as soon as it arrives rather than leaving it out on a desk all afternoon.
Offices need a different kind of order. One basket can hold several addresses, though delivery is charged per address rather than once for the whole batch, and the corporate New Year sets are built with that in mind. A courier getting into a building needs the company name and the floor; where a pass is required, the parcel goes through reception, and the sender is told who took it. An invoice made out to the company, with paperwork to match, is available on request, which is handy for a business around Grand Canal Dock, where Google, Meta, LinkedIn and Airbnb have their European headquarters.
Delivery in central Dublin costs nothing extra, and most orders go out the same day they are placed, though the exact window for any one piece is shown on its own page rather than fixed here. Every composition is photographed before the courier sets off, so the sender sees the finished piece before it is on its way. A good place to start choosing is tabletop arrangements for something that stays put, New Year bouquets for something carried in by hand, and delivery zones for anything outside the centre.