The Night Before Christmas

by Alice Taylor

  “How are you, Dan,” Bill greeted him, ignoring the gibe. “You’re here for Christmas.”

  “What do you think I’m here for: saving the hay?” Dan asked.

  Suddenly Dan’s Prince went tearing up the yard and got clung in a tangle with a few of our dogs. “Come back here, you fool!” Dan called. “Would you ever learn to size up the opposition before you attack?”

  “Who do you suppose he’s taking after?” Bill asked innocently.

  But before Dan could answer I broke in with the good news: “Dan, Dan!” I shouted. “Prince is a father. Nell’s Shep is after having his pups.”

  “Be the holy hoor,” Dan said, “isn’t he the miracle worker?”

  “Nell is very annoyed about it,” I told him primly.

  Dan threw back his head and roared laughing: “Yerra, the ould bitch,” he said; “no harm to give her a bit of a rattle!”

  “You’re full of the spirit of Christmas,” Bill told him. “Yerra, Christmas, me bum,” Dan declared. “Nell doesn’t like Christmas either,” I told him.

  “Pity to be wasting two houses with ye,” Bill told him; “you should move in with her for Christmas and the two of ye could mind the pups together.”

  “How would you like a broken nose for Christmas?” Dan demanded, shoving his fists into Dan’s face. Bill was over six feet tall and about sixteen stone in weight, whereas Dan was not much more than five feet tall and was as thin as a sparrow. He looked like an aggressive terrier attacking a tranquil Great Dane. We all surrounded Bill and pushed Dan away, and just then my father appeared around the corner of the house.

  “Well, Dan,” he said, “the grave or jail didn’t get you.”

  “No,” Dan said, “so I had no choice but to come here, and I’m beginning to regret it already.”

  “Are they after upsetting you?” my father asked sympathetically, much to our annoyance. Dan was the cause of all the trouble as usual, but my father was very fond of him even though he was contrary and cranky.

  “Between Father Christmas here,” Dan said, pointing to Bill, “and all these children, I’ll be deranged before Christmas is even started.”

  “Come on in and warm yourself to the fire. We’ll be having the supper soon,” my father told him, and they both disappeared into the kitchen. Though he was as edgy as a holly spike, we were still glad that Dan had come, because – like the holly spike – he was part of our Christmas.

  When Dan and my father had gone into the kitchen, Bill and ourselves resumed our study of the night sky. It was a clear, bright night and the magic of Christmas was out there in the quiet countryside under the stars. Then we conveyed Bill homewards: down the yard, through the grove and “back over the ditch”, as we called it, and then I sat there and waited for Johnny the Post.

  Christmas Cards

  JOHNNY WAS LATE that day, but then he was always late on Christmas Eve. I sat on the stony ditch behind the house waiting for the first glimpse of his navy cap through the darkness as he came across the fields. Sticking out between the stones of the ditch was an iron step. Originally it had been the step of an old back-to-back trap and my grandfather had buried it in between the stones as he had built the ditch. It provided a firm foothold and an adequate seat, find as it was sheltered by overhanging trees it was umbrella-dry.

  As I sat there I watched shapes of the trees in the old fort behind the house standing motionless above the rattling glaise at their feet. They were like tall, dark shadows waiting quietly. Maybe, I thought, they were waiting for the snow, and I hoped that their wait would not be in vain because I wanted the snow to fill up the quiet valley and turn the countryside into a sparkling fairy-land.

  Meanwhile I waited for Johnny: he would come up the glen from the next farmhouse, but the last light had faded so I could not see that far. A light film of frost lay like a white eiderdown on the blackthorn hedge along the boundary ditch. I knew that Johnny would soon come through a gap in that hedge bringing the last of the Christmas cards.

  The first card had arrived very early in December, even before we had got our holidays from school. It had come all the way from New York in a big envelope with an airmail sticker and brightly coloured stamps. My father had met Johnny out in the fields. Half-way through his supper that night, he had pulled the card out of his pocket.

  “Must be from Kate,” he said dismissively, throwing the card on to the middle of the table; “no one else would be crazy enough to be sending Christmas cards and the threshing hardly over.”

  Sometimes my father had no sense of occasion, but if he did not, we made up for his inadequacies. We pounced on the envelope and, as we scrambled for possession, my mother had to intervene to decide who would have the thrill of opening Aunty Kate’s card. I got the honour because I had a hold of it at the time.

  I laid the large envelope on the table to flatten out the curve that my father’s pocket had created. As my hand smoothed out the bump, I felt the stiff card inside resist the pressure: this was no light, flimsy card but a fine substantial model – a bit like Aunt Kate herself, I thought. The card within the envelope refused to be straightened out, so I peeled open the curved, gummed front carefully in order to avoid damage to its contents. It was certainly worth minding, and when I finally drew out the big red Santa card, we all gasped in appreciation.

  As I eased him out of his narrow enclosure, the frost on the front of his large pot belly created a rough scratching sound against the envelope. Some of his glitter transferred itself on to my fingertips and I waved them about, fascinated by the sparkle. He was a beauty and when he stood in the middle of our kitchen table he brought the warmth and colour of Aunt Kate into her old home. She did not come home very often but when she did she made up for lost time and brought us big boxes of brightly coloured flimsy American clothes and filled the house with her perfume and laughter. She never wrote during the year but always at Christmas her big colourful card was the first to arrive and inside it were pages and pages of a letter in her sprawling, flamboyant writing. She was our favourite aunt and her Christmas card was the yearly connection that bound her to us.

  After Aunty Kate’s card there was a lull for a while, so every day we took out her Santa and admired him; it offered reassurance that Christmas was really coming. Next to arrive were calendars of St Francis and Blessed Martin with an assortment of holy pictures, and though they were better than nothing they were not quite the real thing and so generated no great excitement. These came from Br Matthew, a nephew of my father’s, who was a Franciscan friar and visited us every summer. From inside his long flowing habit he would produce holy pictures, medals and rosary beads and sometimes sweets as well. He was a smiling, happy man and I sometimes thought that his flowing robes were like a folding cupboard they contained so much.

  Then a card arrived from a cousin of my father’s in London. He was in the police and his card was an etching of a dull, grey building and was briefly signed: “With best wishes – Doris and Jim”. Nobody called Doris lived in our part of the country and I had only ever heard the name on the BBC. So, looking at her Christmas card, I tried to imagine what Doris looked like. Hopefully she was not as grey and dull as her card, but then maybe it was our cousin Jim who had chosen it, though if he was anything like my father that was highly unlikely.

  My mother bought the Christmas cards for my father’s relations as well as her own. She bought them with great care and she went to lot of trouble to find verses suitable for the recipients. But when she sent a verse advocating joyous festive feelings to an old aunt whose list of ailments provided her greatest interest in life, I thought that she was overestimating the power of the spirit of Christmas.

  Into most of her cards she put a letter. She spent many nights in the weeks before the festive season writing them by the light of the oil lamp at the kitchen table, often into the small hours of the morning. At that time of year she remembered in particular the family members of the previous generation who had left our house to go to destin
ations all over the world. She felt that, as the woman who had married into the family farm, it was up to her to send them greetings from their old home. She always spoke about “the people away” and how important it was to remember them and to keep in contact. She knew from listening to some of them when they came on summer holidays that at Christmas their thoughts turned to home and they loved to be remembered at that time. For others the card was even more important; it provided the only link they had because they never made it home. I visualised my mother’s Christmas cards as so many messengers winging their way to scattered family members all over the world from the nest from which they or their parents had all flown. She was the warm glow at the heart of our Christmas, but that warmth stretched much further than our house.

  Sometimes one of her Christmas correspondents might miss a Christmas, and then she would wonder if everything was all right with them and would be delighted when the card arrived the following year. But she never failed to send her cards every year, as she maintained that the people away needed them more than the ones at home.

  As we drew closer to Christmas the bundle of cards that Johnny drew out of his bag grew bulkier and each of us was eager to be the one to meet him. He was a small, thin cherry-faced man and his large mailbag stretched from beneath his arm to just above his knee. When he turned his head sideways to peer into its interesting depths, he somehow reminded me of one of our hens tucking her head under her wing to go to sleep. But sleep was the last thing on Johnny’s mind and he had his letters very well organised, whipping them out of his bag and waving them above our heads so that we had to jump up to get them.

  As the Christmas mail grew heavier, Johnny’s day grew longer until on Christmas Eve it was dark before he reached our house. By then we had received most of our cards and they were strung up around the house and hanging off the Christmas tree. As the list of Christmas card senders scarcely varied from year to year, I knew who remained outstanding and among them was Uncle Dan in Oregon, who every year sent a big card with robins or reindeers. Next to Aunt Kate’s his was the best Christmas card, but whereas she was always early he was always late and I worried in case his did not make it in time. Without Uncle Dan’s card on top of the tree beside Aunt Kate’s, Christmas would not seem quite right.

  So I waited for Johnny and thought of Uncle Dan, who had left this house as a young lad of eighteen to go sheep farming in Oregon and who had never come back. Every Christmas my mother wrote to him telling him all the news and every Christmas he sent his lovely card. In a strange way as long as his card was on the tree he was in some way there for Christmas. It was the one card that my father loved to get, and when it arrived he smiled and I knew then that he was ready to enjoy Christmas.

  At last a black shadow that turned out to be Johnny came through the muddy gap beside the fort. As he drew near I could see that the Christmas spirit that people had given him to celebrate the season of good will had gone slightly to Johnny’s head and his balance was not what it should have been. Despite this he had our bundle ready. As I followed him into the kitchen, I pulled the hairy twine from around the cards. I sighed with relief when I saw the big envelope with the American stamp: Uncle Dan had made it in time. But Johnny had a surprise in his bag: much to our amazement he put in his hand and pulled out a parcel. Very seldom did we get a parcel of any description, and when we did it was the cause of great excitement even if it was only a sample of flies for my father’s fishing rod. But a parcel on Christmas Eve could only mean one thing – a present! However, we never received Christmas presents through the post. Santy certainly came, but presents wrapped up in parcels were unheard of. Now we stood around Johnny with our mouths open.

  “Don’t ye want it?” he asked, pretending to put it back in his bag. Four pairs of hands shot up to grab it off him, but he handed it over our heads to my mother and disappeared out the door. It was a sign of how flabbergasted my mother was that she left him go without offering him tea.

  “Will I open it?” she asked of no one in particular.

  “Yerra don’t bother,” my father told her; “sure, no one is interested in what’s in it anyway.”

  His caustic comment brought her to her senses and she looked down at all the curious faces peering intently at her. She took the parcel over to the kitchen table and placed it carefully in the centre. We all stood around looking at it.

  “Well,” my father enquired, “will we open it or will we have a guessing game as to what’s inside?”

  “I wonder who sent it,” my mother said, mystified. “If someone opened it we’d find out,” my father told her.

  “Could it be Kate I wonder?” My mother was talking to herself rather than to us.

  “’Twould be like something she’d do,” my father said in a tone of voice which implied that she was capable of anything.

  At this stage we were all getting restless and were starting to poke and prod at the parcel to ascertain what it might contain. It was quite hard so I decided that there must be a tin box inside the paper wrapping.

  “Would you open the damn thing before they have it torn asunder,” my father advised my mother.

  Carefully she peeled back the paper, taking pains not to tear the stamps. We were restless with anticipation and her slow and careful opening of the parcel had us dancing with impatience around the table. At last the paper was removed to reveal a red box that did not seem to have an opening, and as my mother’s fingers searched around to solve the problem she must have touched a spring, for suddenly the top shot up and a small man popped out. He had a yellow hat, a black face and a red jacket over a white shirt and black dickie bow and he danced up and down in delight at being released.

  “A jack-in-the-box!” we all exclaimed in delight.

  “Just what we need,” my father declared, “and I having six already.” He was forever telling us to sit still and not to be like jack-in-the-box, and because we had never seen one Aunty Kate had decided to send us a real one. We were delighted.

  “No one but Kate would send such a daft thing halfway across the world,” my father said, shaking his head. Later, when I looked up at their cards on the Christmas tree and thought of Uncle Dan out under the stars on the prairies of Oregon and Aunty Kate in New York, I felt that in some way they were with us that night.

  The Night Before Christmas

  THE LIGHTING OF the Christmas candle marked the transition from day into night on Christmas Eve. But before that could be done the farmyard had to be closed down. My father went to the barn and tied a rope around a bundle of hay, as much as he could carry. He hoisted it on to his back, staggering at first under the weight until he got his balance beneath it; then he jolted it upwards until it rested on the back of his head and shoulders; he held it securely in place with the rope coming up over his shoulder and pulled down firmly in front of him by one hand and wound around the other. He walked slowly beneath his awkward load, balancing each foot carefully, his heavy nailed boots clattering off the stone haggard. He gathered speed when he reached the field with the soft sod underfoot and the hill to his back. Watching him walk down the fields in the dusk of the evening, he looked like a walking cock of hay as all you could see were his gaitered legs beneath the load. The sheep, huddled under the hedge in the lower meadow, bleated a welcome to him. They were the only farm animals who would spend Christmas out in the fields; just like the sheep on the first Christmas, they too were out under the stars that were now starting to glitter in the darkening sky.

  Our job was to lock up the hens, who were nestled high on the perches of the hen-house; some had already retired for the night with their heads under their wings. We shot the bolt on the galvanised door in case Mr Fox came during the night in search of an early Christmas dinner. Only the gander and his mother goose gossiped together in the rusty roofed shed in the corner of the haggard. Their year’s work was done and they were relaxing before the cycle began again. Together with all the other animals, they were resting. In the stalls some o
f the cows chewed the cud while others had strings of hay dribbling from their soft mouths, their large, moist eyes staring placidly into space. The stalls were full of their damp bovine smell and their body heat had taken the chill out of the cold night air. From them there was no reaction when we opened the door and walked in amongst them; only a few turned big trusting eyes in our direction. But the horses were all movement and questioning looks when we opened the stable door. Their curious heads curved back towards us and their hind legs stamped on the cobbled floor. Cobwebs draped off the high rafters above their heads and their tackling hung off the wall behind them and in here the smell was of horse sweat and leather. In the stable was one empty manger and in my imagination it was to this manger later that night that Mary and Joseph would come and the baby would be born. It did not have a donkey, but the jennet was the next best thing, though I was glad that he was tied up because no baby would be safe beside him.

  As we returned to the house the moon was coming up over the Kerry mountains on the horizon, rising into a dark-blue sky. Down by the river we could dimly see the sheep in the corner of the field. When we passed the kitchen window the dancing flames from the blazing fire outshone the soft yellow glow of the oil lamp. We were glad to get in from the cold and stand with our backs to the fire, our long skirts pulled up so that we could warm our cold bottoms.

  We laid the table with great care because tonight we were going to have things on it which we had not seen since the previous Christmas, and this was the only occasion other than when we had visitors on which we used a table-cloth. It was a long white cloth with yellow edgings which my mother had got as a wedding present from a favourite aunt. Frances had gone to a cookery night-class in town over the last few months and one of the results of her studies was an iced Christmas cake. She had arrived home with it the night before and we were speechless with admiration when we saw it. Now the cake took pride of place in the centre of the table surrounded by seed loaf – my father’s favourite – barm brack and swiss roll. The anticipation on looking at them all laid out on the table was enough to tempt preliminary sampling but this was strictly forbidden by the cake-maker. My brother was the self-appointed maker of toast, which he always decided should be part of the Christmas supper. The glowing red fire turned the bread golden brown. He buttered it generously as he went along and the smell of toast filled the kitchen. When two stacks of toast running over with butter propped each other up in the big dish before the fire, we were ready for the supper. But first the candle had to be lit. In my mother’s world the needs of the stomach were secondary to the rituals and spirituality of the season. Nothing could to be eaten until the candle had been lit.