“The Fitzgerald Family Christmas” manages the considerable feat of interweaving the personal dramas of nine members of a boisterous Irish-American clan into a coherent mosaic with a streamlined narrative drive. This meditation on forgiveness in the season of glad tidings may lose some steam as it speeds to very predictable places, but it doesn’t turn into a tear-stained greeting card plastered with tinsel and stale peppermints.

This comfortably lived-in movie, written and directed by Edward Burns, offers a textbook example of screenwriting concision. Volumes of information and drama are conveyed with minimal dialogue in a tone so relaxed and offhand you hardly notice the painstaking craftsmanship that went into it.

Burns shuffles this dense material with the dexterity of a card shark. The pace, although swift, is never rushed. The writing and acting give you vivid enough tastes of the characters — there are seven children, two parents, and assorted spouses, lovers and friends — so that each registers as a singular flavor.

The ensemble includes some of the same actors from Burns’ directorial debut in 1995, “The Brothers McMullen.” Together, the actors convincingly evoke the familial and social bonds connecting working-class Irish-Catholic Long Islanders.

If “The Fitzgerald Family Christmas” revisits the world of “The Brothers McMullen,” the names have changed, and Burns is stouter and ruddier than he was 17 years ago. He plays Gerry Fitzgerald, the self-appointed peacemaker and surrogate father figure of a quarrelsome, high-spirited brood of grown-up children he tries to corral for the 70th birthday of their mother, Rosie (Anita Gillette). That birthday falls two days before Christmas, and Rosie, who doesn’t like birthdays, seems not to mind when her children find reasons not to attend.

Gerry, his mother’s darling, owns a nearby tavern and has lived at home since an unspecified tragedy related to Sept. 11. Twenty years earlier his father, Jim (Ed Lauter), abandoned the family. Now Jim, who is broke and ailing, is pestering Gerry to persuade Rosie to allow him to join the family for Christmas dinner. When Jim walked out, leaving her to rear the last four of the seven children by herself, she vowed he would never set foot in her home again.

Rosie may be resilient and feisty, but Gillette’s wonderful performance recognizes the depth of her stored-up hurt and anger. She is reluctant to believe Jim’s claim that he is dying of pancreatic cancer and has only months to live.

Besides Gerry, the more sharply etched characters include his new possible sweetheart, Nora (Connie Britton), the serene caregiver for a friend of Rosie’s; and his hot-tempered brother Quinn (Michael McGlone), who fancies younger women. A sister, Sharon (Kerry Bishe), gravitates toward older men, the latest of whom, nicknamed FX (Noah Emmerich), is a wealthy playboy with a house in the Hamptons.

The others include Gerry’s frightened youngest brother, Cyril (Tom Guiry), who is just out of rehab and faces an uncertain future; his sister Connie (Caitlin Fitzgerald), whose abusive, unemployed partner, JJ (Dara Coleman), explodes when she tells him she is pregnant; Erin (Heather Burns), her father’s favorite, who has married outside the Roman Catholic faith; and an imperious oldest sister, Dottie (Marsha Dietlein Bennett), who has left her husband to hook up with her much younger gardener (John Solo).

The Fitzgeralds’ collective problems aren’t much worse than those of any other large family. And the movie’s attitude is mostly nonjudgmental. Its moral fulcrum is the question only Rosie can answer: Should she allow Jim back into the fold? As that is debated throughout the film, with all points of view taken into account, “The Fitzgerald Family Christmas” addresses the meaning of family ties with a bracing emotional honesty.