A Very Irish Christmas Read online

  They mended the shoes of lords and ladies as well as the common people; everybody was satisfied. Their custom increased from day to day, and all that were disappointed, discontented, or unlucky, came to the hut as in old times, before Spare went to court.

  The rich brought them presents; the poor did them service. The hut itself changed, no one knew how. Flowering honeysuckle grew over its roof; red and white roses grew thick about its door. Moreover, the Christmas Cuckoo always came on the first of April, bringing three leaves of the merry tree—for Scrub and Fairfeather would have no more golden ones. So it was with them when I last heard the news of the north country.

  Christmas Pudding

  COLM TÓIBÍN

  CHRISTMAS MEANT THAT THE WHOLE family was together—my parents and their five children, and also my father’s brother and sister and my mother’s sister. On Christmas Day in Enniscorthy, at one o’clock—the same time as every other Irish family—we ate the same food: turkey and ham and vegetables, including mashed and roast potatoes. The only difference between us and everybody else was that our Christmas pudding was better. My grandmother had known the cook at the Castle, and the cook had slipped her the recipe for the plum pudding that the Roches ate each year.

  The Castle in Enniscorthy, in its current form, was built by the Wallop family, later the Earls of Portsmouth, in the late sixteenth century, and was, for a few hundred years, the center of English rule in our part of the valley. It squatted at the top of Castle Hill, right in the middle of town, with its two staircases, its many grand rooms, and a dungeon. In the early twentieth century, it was restored and expanded by the Roche family, who lived there for almost fifty years. The Roches were a byword for wealth in Enniscorthy. If I ever wanted something new or expensive, my mother would say, “Who do you think we are? The Roches of the Castle?” And I would know then that the item in question was not coming my way. Thus, the idea that we were eating the same pudding on Christmas Day as the Roches was a matter of some pride.

  The recipe, it seemed, had come from America, and it included the usual quantity of nuts and raisins, currants and candied fruit. But whereas the normal Irish recipe called for suet, ours used butter, which was much more expensive. The pudding was boiled for hours, a few weeks before Christmas, and then reheated. Served with cream or brandy butter or flamed with burning brandy, it was pure, unmitigated luxury—soft, moist, almost soggy with goodness. Christmas pudding with suet could be dark in color and somewhat bitter, even greasy; with butter, it was sweetly textured, some of it melting on your tongue while the rest—the nuts and raisins and candied fruit—remained firm and chewy. Even now, thinking about it, I want some.

  The only thing to interfere with the sense of well-being and togetherness induced by this pudding came from my father’s side of the family. My father and his siblings thought that rude words were funny. My mother and her sister believed they were vulgar. Therefore, all rude words, even the smallest and humblest of them, were banned in our house. I suppose it was the wine that gave my father and his siblings courage each year on Christmas Day. In their family, they’d had a tradition of saying the same thing each time the Christmas pudding appeared. It seemed that they’d had a neighbor called Val, who was a notorious crank. Even on Christmas Day, nothing pleased him. Every year, after a long and sumptuous dinner, his wife produced the Christmas pudding and called on him to divide it into sections. She’d say, “Cut the pudding, Val,” and he’d invariably reply, “Cut my shite!” My father and his siblings thought this response gloriously funny.

  Sometimes, as Christmas approached, my mother would ask my father if, for once, we could be spared the repetition of this exchange, so unnecessary and such a bad example to the children. My father would promise to do what he could. But on Christmas Day, when my mother was back in the kitchen, the main course completed, the dishes of turkey and ham cleared from the table, and the smell of the Roches’ plum pudding wafting in, a glint would appear in his eye. His sister would already be laughing quietly, and we five children would wait with glee. Then the pudding would appear, the tension rising as my mother removed the covering and began to divide it among the ten of us. It’s hard to know what I loved more: the pudding itself, the word that would accompany it, or the howls of laughter, met with bitter silence, that would ensue. I think I liked the word best.

  “Cut the pudding, Val,” my father’s brother would say, and then my father and his brother and sister would all call out in unison, “Cut my shite!” They’d roar with laughter, tears running down their cheeks. My mother would take her revenge by announcing that she had bought herself a very good book for Christmas and she was going to spend the rest of the day reading it, and we could all do as we pleased but she would not be setting foot in the kitchen again. “It’s the maid’s day off,” she’d say sourly. In the meantime, when the glee had subsided, the plum pudding from the Roches of the Castle was delicious.

  The Magi

  W. B. YEATS

  Now as at all times I can see in the mind’s eye,

  In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones

  Appear and disappear in the blue depths of the sky

  With all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones,

  And all their helms of silver hovering side by side,

  And all their eyes still fixed, hoping to find once more,

  Being by Calvary’s turbulence unsatisfied,

  The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.

  Candle and Crib

  K. F. PURDON

  Chapter I

  MOLONEY’S

  IT WOULD BE HARD TO find a pleasanter, more friendly-looking place in all Ardenoo than Moloney’s of the Crooked Boreen, where Big Michael and the wife lived, a piece up from the high road. And well might you call the little causey “crooked” that led to their door, for rough and stony that boreen was, twisting and winding along by the bog-side, this way and that way, the same as if it couldn’t rightly make up its mind where it wanted to bring you. So it was all the more of a surprise when you did get to Moloney’s, to find a house with such an appearance of comfort upon it, in such a place.

  Long and low that house was, and very old. You could tell the great age of it by the thickness of the thatch, as well as by seeing, when you were standing inside upon the kitchen floor and looking up, that that same thatch was resting, not upon common planks, sawn with the grain and against the grain and every way, but upon the real boughs themselves, put there by them that had to choose carefully what would be suitable for their purpose, because there were few tools then for shaping timber. So that’s how the branches were there yet, the same as ever, bark and twigs and all; ay, and as sound as the day they were put there, two hundred years before.

  As for the walls at Moloney’s … mud, I’m not denying it! But the thickness of them! And the way they were kept whitewashed, inside and out! They’d dazzle you, to look at them: especially in the kitchen of an evening, when the fire would be strong. And that was a thing that occurred mostly always at Moloney’s. For Herself was a most notorious Vanithee; and there’s no better sign of good housekeeping than a clean, blazing hearth. Sure isn’t that, as a body might say, the heart of the whole house? Heart or hearth, isn’t it all the one thing, nearly? For if warmth and comfort for the body come from the one, doesn’t love and pleasant kindness come from the other? Ay, indeed!

  And now here was the Christmas Eve come round again, when everyone puts the best foot foremost, whether they can or not. And so by Moloney’s. The darkness had fallen, and a wild, wet night it was, as ever came out of the heavens. But that only made the light seem the brighter and more coaxing that the fire was sending out over the half door, and through the little, twinkling bulls’-eyes windows, as if it was trying to say, “Come along in, whoever you are that’s outside in the cold and the rain! Look at the way the Woman has the floor swept, till there isn’t a speck upon it! And the tables and stools scoured like the snow, and the big old pewter plate
s and dishes upon the dresser polished till they’re shining like a goat’s eyes from under a bed! Come in! Sure everyone is welcome here tonight, whether they come or not!”

  And still in all…!

  Well, one look round would tell you, with half an eye, that something was wrong at Moloney’s, Christmas Eve and all as it was. For Big Michael himself was standing there in the kitchen, cracking his red, wet fingers one after the other, and looking most uncomfortable. The wet was running down from his big frieze coat, but it wasn’t that he minded. He was too well used to soft weather to care about wet clothes. Beside him upon the floor was the big market-basket, with all manner of paper parcels, blue and brown, sticking out from under the lid that wouldn’t shut down, he had brought home so much from Melia’s shop. But that basket had a forgotten look about it, because there beside it stood Herself, and she not asking to unpack it or do a thing with it. She was a little bit of a woman, that you’d think you could blow off the palm of your hand with one puff of your breath. As thin as a whip she was, and as straight as a rush; and she was looking up now at Michael with flaming cheeks and eyes like troubled waters.

  “No letter!” she was saying. “And is it that you brought home no letter, after you being to the post! Sure it can’t be but they wrote to say were they coming or not, after they being asked here for the Christmas! Sure I thought you’d surely have word to say when to expect them; and was thinking even that they might be coming with yourself! Only I suppose the little ass and dray wouldn’t be grand enough for the wife! Of coorse I didn’t think of her writing; she may know no better, and isn’t to be blemt if she has no manners; she can’t help the way she was brought up! But Art! Sure there must be a letter from him…!”

  “Wait and I’ll try again!” said Big Michael slowly; and then he took to feel through his pockets again for the letter their son was to have sent them. But when he had done this, he could only shake his head, so that the rain-drops fell from his hair and beard—turning brackety grey, they were, Michael being on in years.

  “No, in trath! Not as much as one letter have I this night!” he said slowly.

  At this the Woman began to laugh, in spite of the great annoyance that was on her.

  “Sure,” she said, “if Mrs. Melia had a letter for us, wouldn’t she have given it to you? What use would she have for it? And if she hadn’t, and told you so, where’s the sense in you feeling your pockets over and over? A body’d think you expected letters to grow there, the same as American apples in barrels! How could you have there what you didn’t put there? But let you go on off ou’er this now! Look at the state you have the clean floor in, with the rain dreeping from your cota-mor!”

  “Coming down it is, like as if it was out of a sieve!” said Michael. “And wasn’t it God that done it, that I took the notion to cut the holly’n’ivy while the day was someways fine, afore I started off to the shop! Has it safe below … so I’ll just go for it now, the way we can be settling out the Crib and all …”

  “There’ll no holly’n’ivy go up on these walls tonight, if I’m to be let have a say in the business!” said Mrs. Moloney. “Sich trash and nonsense! Making mess and trouble for them that has plenty to do without that! And as for the Crib, let it stop where it is …”

  On the word she went back to her stool in the chimney corner, where she always sat bolt upright, and took up her knitting, the same as if it wasn’t the Christmas Eve at all. For Art, their only child, that stocking was meant. But her hands were shaking so much that she dropped more stitches off the needles than she made, and still she persevered. Big Michael looked at her for a bit, very pitiful; even opened his mouth once, as if he wanted to say something; a nice, silent person he was, very even-going in himself. But he must have thought better of it, for he only shook his head again, and turned and went off out of the door into the wild storm and darkness, with the wind howling and threatening all about the bog and countryside, the shockingest ever you knew.

  And as soon as he was gone, didn’t the Woman throw down her knitting, and laid her head upon her knees, and cried and cried, till her blue checky apron was like as if it was after being wrung out of a tub of suds.

  “Och, Art!” she’d cry. “Isn’t this the queer way for you to be going on! To say you never answered the letter that was wrote to you! This very day five-and-twenty years you came here to us! As lovely as a little angel you were! The grand, big blue eyes of you! And the way you’d laugh up at me and put out the little hand…! And you the only one ever God sent us! And never a word between us, only when you took the notion to go off to Dublin; sure it near broke our hearts, but what could we do, only give you our blessing! And … and then hearing the good accounts of the way you were going on…. But it’s the wife that done it all, and has him that changed…! Too grand she is, no doubt, for the likes of us! Och, grand how-are-ye! No, but not half good enough for Art! He that was always counted a choice boy by all that knew him! And any word them that saw the wife beyant in Dublin with him brought back, was no great things. A poor-looking little scollop of a thing, they tell me she is; and like as if she’d have about as much iday of taking butter off a churn, or spinning a hank of yarn, as a pig would have of a holiday! What opinion could any sensible body have of that kind of a wedding, without even a match-maker to inquire into the thing, to see was it anyways suitable or not! Och, Art! Art! It’s little I thought, this day five-and-twenty years, the way the thing would be now!”

  Chapter II

  THE STABLE

  WHILE POOR MRS. MOLONEY WAS fretting like this, and it Christmas Eve and all, Big Michael was making his way through the wind and the sleety rain to where he had his stable, a piece off from the house. It was pitch-dark, so that he couldn’t see his hand before his eyes, if he held it up; but he had his lantern, and anyway he knew his way about blindfold. But even in daylight you might pass by that stable ready, unless you knew it was there. For it was very little, and being roofed with heather it looked only like a bit of the bog that had humped itself up a bit higher than the rest.

  Poor-looking and small as it was, Big Michael was very proud of that stable. He and Art had built it together, just before Art leaving home. It was wanted to keep the little wad of hay or straw safe from the weather, as well as to shelter the cow of a hard night. And after Art had gone off to the Big Smoke, and for no other reason only getting restless, as young hearts often do, many and many a time Michael would slope off to the stable, and sit down there to take a draw of the pipe and to wish he had his pleasant, active young boy back at home again. He missed Art full as much as the mother, and maybe more.

  In fact, it was getting into a habit with Michael to go off to the stable. He had the best of a wife, but still there were times when he’d wish to be with himself somewhere, so that he could take his ease, and still not be feeling himself an annoyance to a busy woman. Big Michael himself, the people said, always looked as if he thought tomorrow would do. But the Woman that owned him was of a different way of thinking, always going at something. So he got the fashion of keeping out of her way.

  When he got to the stable this night, a bit out of breath with the great wind, he took notice first of the cow, and he saw that she was comfortable, plenty of straw to lie upon, and plenty of fodder before her. So then he bethought him of the little ass that was outside under the dray yet.

  “I’ll put her in, too!” he thought. “Destroyed she is and quite weakly with the wet, like all donkeys, God help them! Let alone the mud and gutter she’s after travelling through, all that long ways from the shop! And carrit the things we were in need of, too! I’ll let her stand here near the cow. A good dry bed I’ll put under her, and give her a grain of oats to pet her heart. It’ll not go astray with her, and she has it well earned, the creature!”

  So he unyoked the ass and led her into the stable, and rubbed down her shaggy coat, all dripping like his own clothes, and fed her, and watched with a curious satisfaction the nice way, like a lady, that she took the feed
he put before her.

  “Poor Winny!” he said, rubbing a finger up and down her soft ears. “Many’s the time Art laughed at you, and said it was only one remove from a wheel-barra to be driving you! Ling-gerin’ Death is what he used to call you! But sure you do your best! And if you were the fastest horse ever won the Grand National, you could do no more!”

  He looked round then, with a very satisfied feeling. There he had them, the two poor animals that depended out of him, but that served him and his so well, too; had them safe and warm from the storm and rain outside. He swung the lantern to and fro, so that he could see everything that was in the stable. One end of it was filled with hay and straw. The light gleamed here, gleamed there upon the kind, homely plenty he had stored. Then it fell upon a heap of something else; something that glistened from many points, green and cheerful.

  “The holly’n’ivy,” Big Michael thought, “that I cut this morning, and has it here, the way it would be handy to do out the place in greenery against Art and the wife would be here! Well, well! I wouldn’t wish to go against Herself, and she so fretted; but sure I might as well not have cut it at all!”

  He stood and stared at it, very mournful in himself. For the best part of the Christmas to Michael was not the good feeding Herself always provided, though he could take his share of that, as well as another; no, but the holly and ivy and the Candle and the Crib; and now she had set her face against them all. And it wouldn’t be Christmas at all, he thought, without them!

  A sudden thought came into his mind.

  “Why can’t I have it Christmas here,” he said to himself, “and not be letting all these beautiful green branches go to waste! That’s what I’ll do!”