Home For Christmas

by Alice Taylor

  Praise for Alice Taylor’s other books:

  Tea and Talk

  ‘One to warm the heart this winter.’ Connacht Tribune

  ‘One of the country’s most accomplished storytellers.’ Irish Mail on Sunday

  And Time Stood Still

  ‘Reminded me of the value of family, friendship and community.’ Irish Independent

  The Women

  ‘Highly enjoyable read.’ Ireland’s Own

  Dedication

  For my mother, Lena Taylor,

  and all mothers who nurtured the sacred seeds of Christmas in the hearts of their children

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  1 ‘Away in a Manger’

  2 Holly Sunday

  3 Green Gifts

  4 Cakes, Puddings and Pies

  5 Keeping in Touch

  6 Christmas Reading

  7 Bringing the Christmas

  8 Christmas Market

  9 Open House

  10 The Christmas Press

  11 Decorating the House

  12 Moss Gathering

  13 The Royal Gift

  14 The Candle in the Window

  15 The Sacred Bridge

  16 Christmas Eve

  17 Christmas Day

  18 Between the Christmases

  About the Author

  Recent Books by Alice Taylor

  Copyright

  Christmas was a warm glow that shone through the cold winter of our school days. Come December, its lights began to twinkle invitingly from a far distant horizon and a sense of anticipation kept us trudging on determinedly in its direction. A bright contrast to the rest of the year, its radiance spread far wider than its allotted twelve days. Like the beacon of a lighthouse, Christmas shone across those bleak winter days drawing us invitingly towards its warm heart.

  Down through the years that Christmas glow has never faded for me. It all began in an old-fashioned farmhouse from where we walked daily across the fields to a small two-roomed school looking across the river valley at the Kerry mountains. A Christmas candle was lit there that still glows warmly in my heart.

  Going to school was a sentence inflicted on us in childhood during what would otherwise have been days of freedom. Adults constantly assured us that we were swimming through seas of ignorance to reach the desirable shore of being educated, and in our struggle across these seas of ignorance there were three islands of reprieve – namely, the school holidays. These kept us going, even when the waters between them were not to our liking. First came the Easter holidays, and, though darkened by the shadows of Lenten fasting, they were redeemed by Easter Sunday, with the return to eating sweets and with the arrival of baby calves and of bluebells beneath the trees in the nearby fort.

  Then it was a short span to reach the summer-holiday island, with its long warm days of haymaking and swimming in the river down by the meadows. But when summer ended, there was a long, long, cold stretch to reach the Christmas island, and there were hazardous waters to cross – waters of tumbling brown torrents, muddy gaps, dripping trees and soaking wet boots, freezing mornings, frozen fingers and toes with chilblains. The Christmas island seemed almost unreachable as we journeyed across grey frosty fields or through driving rain to arrive, soaking wet with chilled bodies, to sit in an unheated classroom until evening.

  In our two-roomed school there were two fires: one in the master’s room, which heated the chimney, and the other in the smaller children’s room, where an ancient range coughed out black smoke. On this we warmed our bottles of milk before going out into the play yard, where we ran around, having hunts and cat-and-mouse games to warm our freezing extremities. Before the range had heated itself up properly it was time to go home, and by then the air in the room, fanned by tall rattling windows and holes in the timber floor, had only just come up above zero degrees.

  The thought of Christmas approaching was like a warm candle glowing in the distance. Would we survive until then? Sometimes it seemed like a mirage in the distance. Was it real? Would it ever come? The master kept us guessing as to when we would actually get our holidays, and I worried that Christmas would somehow pass us all by and never call to our school. Could we be left marooned in our frozen corner?

  Then a miracle happened. A new teacher came to replace one of the regular ones. She was young, bright and beautiful, and like a brilliant butterfly she brought colour and vibrancy into the grey world of winter. We soaked it up like dry sponges. She sang and danced and introduced us to the wonders of the tuning fork, which we viewed as if it were a magic wand. She struck it smartly off the edge of the desk, and it hit a note that was supposed to somehow launch us into a musical air. There was many a false start and crash landing, but eventually we took off.

  With the arrival of December, our teacher talked constantly about the approaching Christmas. Then, wonder of wonders, she decided to teach us a Christmas carol. Up to then, carols were confined to the radio or to the church choir on Christmas morning. They were not part of our normal school curriculum, and our singing repertoire was limited to ‘do, re, mi’ and songs with a nationalistic flavour. This Christmas angel decided that our repertoire should be stretched to include a seasonal item. Christmas would not go unheralded, she proclaimed. We were delighted.

  Her choice of carol was inspired: ‘Away in a Manger’ was perfect for our farming background – this carol was speaking our language. That evening I arrived home bearing a grubby copybook into which the words of ‘Away in a Manger’ had been laboriously copied. My brother Tim, who had a wonderful tenor voice and who was part of the local church choir, was a great help. When he launched into ‘Away in a Manger’, we heard the heights to which our teacher was trying to raise us. Assisted by our neighbour Bill, who came every night to help with our lessons, we diligently learnt the words, and they became imprinted into my memory.

  The ‘Manger’ got a fair mangling in our original renditions, but our young teacher was blessed with the power of positive thinking, and slowly but surely we began to sound almost bearable. We knew by her face when we began to achieve notes that were less jarring and eventually grasped a bit of the rhythm. Well, at least most of us did. Our conductor believed in inclusiveness, and in her world there were no such people as non-singers. We were all potential nightingales, she assured us, and refinement would come with practice. And practise we did. She lifted us up into musical spheres previously undreamed of not to mention unattainable.

  Every day in school I eagerly looked forward to the singing class. It was the last class of the day, and when you are just ten years old that is a long, long wait. At last singing class arrived. After striking her magic fork off the desk, our teacher stood in front of us waving a conductor’s baton. As far as we were concerned she might as well have been brandishing a bread knife, but so enthusiastic and joyful was her approach that within minutes she had us all fired up and trying desperately to get the rhythm.

  Then, miraculously, one day a breakthrough came. We were actually singing tunefully. The teacher might have been conducting with a baton, but to us she was waving a magic wand that was transforming the stable in our farmyard into a cave on a hillside in Bethlehem, our manger into the manger in Bethlehem.

  With every wave of her baton she wove magic through the air, and my picture of the stable became clearer and clearer. The baby Jesus was lying on the hay, with Mary and Joseph kneeling beside him and the shepherds watching silently from the shadows. Angels floated through the night sky and swept in through the high windows of the stable, and sheep came up from the fields and in the stable door. Our two farm horses, Paddy and James, were transformed into a friendly grey donkey and a brown cow contentedly chewing the cud. Christmas had c
ome into our stable. Christmas was coming home to our farm.

  For me, that carol ‘Away in a Manger’ has never lost its magic. It is our old stable, the baby Jesus, a grey donkey, a brown cow, sheep coming in the door and angels floating through the air. It’s home, it’s Bethlehem, and it’s Christmas.

  Getting ready for Christmas on the farm began with bringing the heifers up from the fields by the river into the warmth of the stalls for the winter. Grass was no longer growing, and, as the land became softer after persistent rain, the animals could cut it up. Also, they needed sheltered housing during the cold winter months.

  My father might have thought that all this was necessary, but the heifers had other ideas. They had enjoyed free-range roaming facilities all along the banks of the river since they arrived as lovable baby calves in early May. Now they were no longer lovable babies but rampaging teenagers with one common bond – and that was to do things their way. Their way was not my father’s way, which, on the day of their enforced return up through the hilly fields to the farmyard, led to a bellowing confrontation between man and animal.

  It would prove to be a battle of wills. The heifers were young, wild, strong-willed and determined to resist any stop put to their gallop. And gallop they did. When they succeeded in breaking free of our encircling army, they took off at full speed with tails flying high, heading back down to the river bank. My father shot after them with a tirade of colourful profanities that were enough to set fire to the sods of earth flying high behind them.

  Once ensconced in their desired location under the trees along by the river, they eyed us from beneath the bare branches with frothing mouths, swishing tails, stamping hooves and wild eyes. They were formidable opponents, girding themselves for the next assault. But there was one weakness in their position. Backed by the trees and the deep river, they had no retreat so were open to frontal attack. My father, their arch-enemy, reassembled his army, and the military manoeuvre began again.

  Slowly, the opposing army surrounded the encamped army, endeavouring to block off all means of escape. We were positioned at different gaps up along the fields from the river to the farmyard. No general issued orders with the same exactitude as my father, intent on hemming in the heifers from all angles. You needed to know your field history to be able to follow his instructions: ‘Aliceen, will you block off Matty’s Gap?’ and ‘Phileen, will you cover Jack Free’s Hole?’

  Knowing our terrain, we understood perfectly, but trying to outrun a four-legged young heifer who had the speed of an Olympian was another matter altogether. If they outran us, our commander-in-chief spared no details as to our ineptitude, and if we outran them, we were confronted by a wild-eyed snorting heifer contemplating tossing us into the air out of her path. One outcome could leave you physically dead, and the alternative could lead to mental annihilation.

  After many breaks for freedom, during which both armies advanced and retreated, the heifers were frog-marched as far as the stall doors. They peered with wild-eyed terror into the dark depths of the ancient stone stall. To them, after months enjoying fields of freedom along by the river, these were the gates of Hell. And we were the Devil incarnate. We held our ground and, by sheer physical force, edged them forward until their heads slipped between the stalls, which we quickly snapped shut. By then the heifers were exhausted – and so was Dad’s Army.

  It was a stormy start to our Christmas preparations, but after that things calmed down. The sheep were light-footed so did little damage to the land over winter, and their thick fleecy coats protected them from the winter cold. As on the first Christmas night, they alone were out in the fields. Around the farmyard the work had eased because much of the livestock had been sold off before Christmas. The pigs had gone to market, as had the geese and ducks, so the hens alone remained to be fed. The farmyard rested. The animal world too was preparing for Christmas.

  A major safari was undertaken a few weeks before Christmas when the eagerly awaited Holly Sunday arrived. We set out, with balls of foxy binder twine, a saw and a hatchet, to bring home the holly – the refinement of a pruner had yet to find its way into the depths of rural Ireland. Collecting the holly was our first step in the preparations for Christmas. Our suppressed, simmering anticipation was at last free to boil over because the door into the wonder of Christmas had swung open.

  We trudged through stubble-stiffened fields, through fields of saturated grass and through sprouting green rushes and waded through muddy gaps laden with puddles of winter rain. Finally we reached the river that was the boundary running along the valley between us and a neighbouring farm. We got across this river by skilfully balancing on top of the large stepping stones put in position by our neighbour Bill. Having acquired our balance on the first stone, we then jumped onto the next one, where we did the same balancing act, and mercifully reached the other side without losing our footing and toppling into the swirling water.

  Then up many hilly fields and across thorny ditches until we reached the wood. Here we did a tour of inspection along the edges of the wood, trying to locate the tree with the best red berries. Sometimes the birds had beaten us to it so we had to go deeper into the wood until we were all satisfied as to which was the best holly tree. Then we brought the saw into action and cut down a profusion of berried branches. Sometimes, if a branch proved too stubborn, the crack of the hatchet brought it into final submission. If my father, who was a protector of trees, had been with us, he would soon have put a stop to our tree-mauling. All the holly was collected into thorny heaps, then it was tied with the binder twine into firm bundles and swung over our shoulders.

  The journey home was more hazardous because our river balancing act was encumbered by the bundles of holly on our backs. But years of precarious ditch-climbing and river-crossing had honed our athletic skills, so, after a few near misses, we reached the other bank safely. On arrival, we carried the bundles of holly to the old turf house at the end of the yard, which had been washed out in preparation for the geese whose plucked bodies would soon hang there.

  Before the geese could be plucked, the grisly business of execution was undertaken by my mother, who did it quietly behind closed doors. Then we all sat down with a still-warm goose across our knees, and plucking commenced. Feathers and white down fluttered all over us and turned us into snow children as the tea chest in the middle of the circle between us gradually filled to overflowing. The feathers and down were later used to fill pillows and feather ticks. (Duvets had yet to float into our bedrooms.) The goose wings had their knuckles seasoned by the fire and were then used as dust collectors on the stairs or tied to a long handle to collect high-flying cobwebs.

  The plucked geese were hung off the rafters in the old stone turf house. Here they swung, heads downwards, like fallen angels. Peering in at their grey, ghost-like figures in the semi-darkness, through a gap in the battered wooden door, had the same scaring effect as ghost stories told around the fire late at night. Some of these geese would go to town cousins, and three were for our own festive consumption on Christmas Day, New Year’s Day and Little Christmas.

  Preparation of the yard and house were next on the agenda. Work began outside. All the outhouses and walls were whitewashed or cement-washed, and the yards were given a good brushing. Then attention was given to the inside of the house. Black Ned came to clean the chimney, and we children were convinced that he was getting it ready for Santa. Today, when my chimney cleaner Tim comes, he is armed with a vacuum cleaner, and I do not see even a trace of soot in the entire process. Back then, not so. The giant operation of cleaning the chimney brought the whole house to a standstill. It was the one day of the year when the fire, our only source of heat and our only means of cooking, was out of action. Soot billowed down when Ned pushed his brushes up the wide chimney, screwing on additions as the handles disappeared from view. The billowing soot, as well as filling the fireplace, swirled out over the entire kitchen like a blanket of black snow. Job done, Ned wrapped up his sticks and, looki
ng a little blacker than when he arrived, disappeared out the gate.

  Then the big clean-up began. The hob was whitewashed, and it was a matter of pride to have the line dividing the black smoke channel from the whitewashed area be straight. Everything in the kitchen had to be washed and scrubbed. The kitchen table and chairs were scrubbed white from a tin bucket of hot water laced with washing soda. If the morning happened to be fine, the chairs were carried to the spout at the end of the yard where they could get a better scrubbing under the flowing water. Finally, the cement kitchen floor was scrubbed clean with a deck brush. We were ready for a health-and-safety inspection if they had been in vogue at the time.

  All the bedrooms got a scrubbing and a polishing too, which was no small job as those were the days of timber floors or linoleum. I can remember skating across the linoleum with worn knickers under my bare feet, the better to effect a good shine. This was the real beginning of getting ready for Christmas. It took days before things got back to normal.

  Cleaning the windows was my regular household job. Every Saturday throughout the year I was supplied with newspaper dipped in paraffin oil to do the kitchen windows, but come Christmas my responsibilities extended to all the windows of the house. I enjoyed the undertaking, feeling that Santa would appreciate my clean windows. I must have thought he was a hygiene inspector.

  Traces of that belief must still remain with me because to get ready for Christmas now I give the house an overhaul. And, as on the farm, I begin outside. The first step in my preparations for Christmas is putting the garden to bed. Maybe, for me, the garden is my farm. I cut back all the perennials no longer looking good and push those who do not like Jack Frost into shady corners. One year I left this job until after Christmas, believing that there would be no hard frost until January. Boy, was that a mistake. I lost all my beautiful Cannas, which turned into brown mush overnight. A lesson never to be forgotten.