Father Christmas is not the only one to work all night at Christmastime.  As Christmas Day approaches they are burning the midnight oil in our local butcher's too.

Village butcher Joe Gleeson is used to working 12 hour days for much of the year. With hundreds of festive orders to prepare he has to double his workload and call in his entire family and former "Saturday boys" to help.  There have been Christmases in the past when it has involved 24 hour working on the the day before Christmas Eve.

However, it's worth it if it keeps the customers happy. And  happy customers are a feature at Joe's shop on the corner of  West  Avenue and Hazlemere Road.

In fact,  the Christmas queue to collect pre-ordered meat  and other goodies is one of the jolliest places to be in the village in the days leading up to the holiday. Joe  puts up a marquee to protect customers from the elements and hands out mince pies and hot drinks. It's even been known for the waiting throng to burst into carol singing!

This will be Joe's 27th Christmas at the shop he has run since the age of 24.  When he arrived here in 1984 there were three butchers  in the village following the recent closure of King's.  Now he's  the only one.  But with communities like ours continuing to lose their local shops, Joe never rests on his laurels.

"I never ever take our customers for granted," he says. "Tastes and fashions may change in food, but personal service doesn't …and personal service  and quality produce is what we try to give.  Whenever we can we use local suppliers and source our beef from Scotland, our lamb from Devon, our pork from Oxfordshire and our poultry from East Anglia."

Joe still offers a delivery service - a service that may involve helping out the odd, probably elderly, customer with a quick problem that can be fixed in the home - and his customers come from far and wide.  One - and ex-resident in the village - moved to Derby but needs to visit the Heathrow area once a month for work.  So every month he emails a month's meat order to Joe and collects it on his way back to Derbyshire.

Joe was born in Ealing in 1960, the sixth of seven children.  His Irish parents - his dad was a master plasterer and his mum a nurse -  came to England from County Tipperary, where many of his relatives still live.

When he was a lad he looked around for a Saturday morning job to earn some cash, and was taken on at a local butcher's in Northolt.  He clearly impressed, and when he left school at 16 he was offered a full time job in the shop. Within two years he was the store's manager.

At about the same time he started dating Larrayne, who lived a few doors away in the same street as his Ealing home, and in 1982 they married.

By now Joe was determined to set up in a business of his own and began looking for butchers' shops for sale. And so it was that in 1984, accompanied by Larrayne and a four month old daughter Lyndsey, the Gleesons made their first visit to Penn.

"There were two shops on the market - Streeters (now the estate agent on the corner of Church Road and Elm Road) and John Jones, next to the garage," he recalls. "We decided on John Jones' shop because we liked the idea of the parking area at the front."

He set to work building up his business, working long hours and, for the first eight years, never taking a holiday. As his family grew - Lewis was born in 1986 followed by Olivia in 1992 - Joe and Larrayne inevitably became more involved in the community.

"I remember a couple of friends asked me to come along to the first meeting of the middle school's parents' association," he recalls, "and somehow I came out of that meeting having been elected vice chairman! "

It was the start of a long involvement with village events. He has been deeply  involved in the organisation of balls, dinners, fetes and other fund raising gatherings for Tylers Green First and Middle Schools, the Sports and Social Club and Penn School as well as village-wide  social events. He has spent hours putting questions together for school quizzes, where he often acts as quiz-master.

Larrayne has always been there to help. With Lyndsey she began making up balloon designs for parties and that itself grew into a separate  family business. Eight years ago they launched  Thrills and Spills, which is now based in a shop in Coppice Farm Road, providing equipment for parties and celebrations.   Of course Christmas is a busy time for them too, but they still come together to help with the preparations for the festivities in the butcher's shop.

Although running a one-man family business is tough Joe wouldn't swap it. He has never wanted to expand into running a chain of shops and, thankfully,  has no intention of taking early retirement even though he's now a granddad - his first grandchild Ivy-Rose was born to Olivia in July.

Of course there have been times when he  has wondered if it was all worth it…"I remember one Christmas Eve it was chucking it down with rain and at about 7.30pm I dropped off the last turkey to a house in Beaconsfield. They were partying so loud it took ages for them to hear me banging on the door…then the lady realised she had forgotten to order the sausage meat.  I have to admit as I drove back, exhausted and very wet, to collect half a pound of sausage meat I did think 'why am I doing this?' .

"But then again," he says, with typical Irish optimism, "you have to remember there are far more good times than bad."