by Eamon Kelly
I was often roused in the night in the month of November by a loud bellow. I thought it was the púca. No, my father told me, it was a wild stag from Muckross Estate deer park. He had been defeated in his fight for the supremacy of the herd, and would roam the countryside looking for another herd where he could fight again and maybe be king.
Jack o’ the Lantern was another being that used to be seen at night. He was a wandering soul and when he was in this world it was said that he committed some heinous crime like killing his father. When he died St Peter wouldn’t let him into heaven. He went down to hell and the devil wouldn’t let him in there either. Jack pushed his face inside the door and the flames were so great and the heat so intense that his nose caught fire. The devil slammed the door shut and Jack o’ the Lantern is going around at night ever since, his nose glowing in the dark. He is seen in marshy places dipping his face in the water to cool his burning nose.
We wouldn’t put our heads outside the door on Hallowe’en. All kinds of spirits were said to be abroad that night. We passed the hours playing games we heard our elders talk about. With a length of string we suspended an apple from the joists. Then the participants had their hands tied behind their backs and tried to take a bite of the apple. A useless exercise until two of us came at each side and by pressing our mouths succeeded in getting bites out of the apple. A variation of this childish innocence was to try to take a bite of an apple floating in a dish of water. When the water spilled all over the kitchen a halt was put to this activity.
Especially for Hallowe’en night my mother bought a barmbrack. Three objects were hidden in the cake: a pea, a stick and a ring. Whoever got the pea would be forever poor. The finder of the stick would be master over all and the one who got the ring would be next to marry. If you put the ring under your pillow you would dream of what your wife would look like.
Now that November was on the wane Christmas was on its way. Throughout the year we dreamed of Christmas. It couldn’t come soon enough, and when it came it couldn’t stay long enough. We small people worked hard on Christmas Eve helping my father set the tall white candles in crocks of sand, one for every window in the house. Holly sprigs from the huge holly tree which grew at the corner of our house were spiked into the sand around each candle. These sprigs were decorated with flowers which my mother made from coloured crêpe paper. We decked out the kitchen with holly, laurel and ivy, placing it around the window, over the door and on top of the clevvy and the dresser. Two mottoes had been kept from the year before, and were put by the fireplace. One read ‘Happy Christmas’ and the other ‘A Bright New Year’.
When darkness fell on Christmas Eve the youngest child in the house lit the first candle, my father’s large hand making the sign of the cross on his small head and shoulders. The other candles were lit from this and we raced from room to room revelling in the new blaze of light, and out into the yard to see what the effect was like from the outside. We watched the bunches of lights come on in the houses of the townland. They were like clusters of stars as they appeared down the valley and up the rising ground to Rossacrue. Our principal meal was always in the middle of the day. One o’clock was dinnertime, but on Christmas Eve, big Christmas as we called it, the main meal was after the candles were lit. First we all knelt down to say the rosary. Kneeling at the head of the table my mother gave out the prayer in the voice of a high priestess. After the creed she said the first decade. Tonight it was the glorious mysteries. My father said the second decade, I the third and my brothers completed the five decades. Even though my mother’s thoughts were soaring on a high plane of piety she didn’t forget now and then to look towards the fire to see how the dinner was cooking. Most rosaries ended with, ‘Hail, Holy Queen, mother of mercy, hail, our life, our sweetness and our hope,’ but ours didn’t. When we touched our breasts, calling on the Sacred Heart to have mercy on us, my mother launched into the trimmings:
Come Holy Ghost send down those beams
Which sweetly flow in silent streams.
She prayed for the lonely traveller, for the sailor tossed by the tempest, for our emigrants, for the poor souls, for the sinner who was at that very moment standing before the judgement seat of God and last of all for all of her family:
God bless and save us all,
St Patrick, Bridget and Colmcille guard each wall,
May the Queen of Heaven and the angels bright
Keep us and our home from all harm this night!
Our knees ached as we got up from the floor, and it took my father a long time to get the prayer arch out of his back. We all helped to lay the table. The good tablecloth for Christmas Eve. We were ravenous, but as the eve of a feast was a day of fast and abstinence we, like all our neighbours, had salted ling, a type of cured fish. We saw it opened out flat and nailed to shop doors when we were in town doing Christmas shopping. It was over an inch thick and hanging on the door with the tail at the top, it seemed to be three and a half feet long and two feet wide. The shopkeeper cut squares off it and weighed them. These were put steeping in boiling water the night before to get rid of the salt. When the ling was properly cooked it tasted fine, especially when my mother added to it her own special concoction of white onion sauce. We had whatever vegetables were in season, big laughing potatoes and home-made butter in which you got the barest taste of salt. It was a simple meal but we ate until we could eat no more. We leaned against the backs of our chairs and sighed, ‘We’re bursting!’ ‘A nice grace after meals!’ my mother said as she started, ‘We thank Thee, O Lord, for these Thy gifts …’ As my father finished the signing of the cross after the prayer he remarked half to himself, ‘This house is turning into a monastery!’
After the dinner we helped my mother prepare some food in the cow’s feeding tub and my father gave an extra sheaf of oats to the pony. The cow dined alone as her calf had been sold at the November fair at Martyr’s Hill. Then we all sat around the fire. The Christmas log, bloc na Nollag, as the old people called it, with sods of turf built around it, was catching fire. The green moss still attached to the bark was turning brown and little jets of steam shot out which made the cat sit up. In a while’s time when the heat got to the log it aimed sparks at us, and the cat, rising and humping her back, spat in the direction of the log and moved under a chair. The dog ignored the fireworks.
It was time now for my mother to open the Christmas box she got in Reidy’s shop where we dealt in town. There was a bottle of wine for herself. That was put away to share with the women who called on small Christmas night, the women’s Christmas (6 January). There was lemonade for us and biscuits, and last to come out was a Christmas cake. We had slices of this and cups of lemonade. My father would never look at the Christmas cake. His eye was on the big brown jar full of porter and resting on top of the bin. He wouldn’t drink unless he had company. Knowing this, my mother sent me for our next door neighbour to come and sit with us. Our candles lit my way for one half and the neighbour’s lit my way for the second half of the journey. Pat Murrell came with a ‘Happy Christmas everyone!’ and after the exchange of small pleasantries my father took the cork off the brown earthenware jar and poured out two glasses of porter, black as night when it settled, with two creamy collars on top. He handed one to Pat, and he by the way taken by surprise said, ‘What’s this?’ ‘Go on take it,’ my father urged. ‘’Tis Christmas night and more luck to us!’ Pat’s face brightened and, lifting his glass, he wished us health and happiness and prayed that we all might be alive again the same time next year.
It was bedtime for us and when my mother went down to the kitchen I came out of the bed and sat on the return steps of the stairs to hear the conversation between Pat and my father. When he got his second glass Pat said, ‘I hope we don’t go too far with this, like the militiaman in the town of Tralee. He was a raw recruit,’ he continued, ‘and on pay night he got so drunk that on the way home he passed the barracks and walked out into the country. He sat on a mossy bank and thinking it was his bed
he took off all his clothes. He folded his uniform and put it as he thought under the bed. Where did he put it but into a gullet that was there. He lay down and tried to sleep. The night began to freeze and after a while he woke up still tipsy but if the cat went a pound he couldn’t find his clothes. He walked off and I can tell you he was feeling the cold now. He kept going until he saw a light in a house in a bit from the road. He threw a stone at the door and it was opened by a young woman. She invited him in.
‘“I can’t go in,” he told her, “I am as naked as when I came into the world!”
‘“Well,” says she, “There’s an old suit of clothes here that won’t be wanted any more. My husband is after dying on me!”
‘She prayed for the dead and the soldier did so too. Then she threw him out the suit of clothes and he got into it. When he went into the house he saw her husband’s corpse laid out on the settle bed. The young woman gave him a glass in his hand. A nice drop it was too and it put the life back into him. As he sat by the warm fire he could hear the young woman talking and laughing with a man in the room.’
‘Tch, tch, tch,’ my mother said, and began to busy herself around the house.
‘Sitting there by the fire,’ Pat went on, ‘and with the light from a candle, the militiaman was taking stock of his surroundings. Whatever look he gave at the corpse’s face he thought he noticed the left eyelid fluttering a bit.’
‘The Lord save us!’ I could hear mother saying.
‘On close examination,’ the storyteller said, ‘he saw the beads moving that were entwined around the corpse’s fingers. All of a sudden the corpse turned his face and beckoned the soldier to come over to him.
‘“Bend down your head,” he whispered, “until I tell you. I am an old man married to a young woman and letting on to be dead was the only way of finding out if she was unfaithful to me. I have proof now. Do you see that three-pronged pike at the butt of the kitchen? Bring me up that and put it here beside me in the bed!”
‘“Go up now,” the old man said, keeping his voice low, “and turn down Jack the Cuckoo and my wife out of the room.”
‘The soldier went to the door of the room and called them and when they came down the “corpse” was dead again.
‘“What’s wrong?” the young woman said.
‘“You know well what’s wrong!” says the old man, jumping out of the bed. Jack the Cuckoo gave a gasp and made for the door but the old man put the imprint of three prongs in his backside as he went out. The young woman was going to close the door when her husband said, “Take your shawl and go with him; it will keep the two of ye warm in a gripe!”
‘She took the shawl from the peg and went out and as she closed the door after her the old man said to the soldier, “An unfaithful woman is only an encumbrance to a man. You can keep the clothes. I have a good Sunday suit I can wear.”
‘The soldier had a warm bed for the night and at dawn he set out for the barracks in Tralee. When he went in the militia were drilling in the square and when they saw the raw recruit in a suit miles too big for him they roared out laughing. He was hauled before the captain to explain himself, and he told the story the same as I have told it to you. A major on horseback went out the road to where the soldier described and found the Queen’s uniform in a gullet. I forget now what punishment he got. Maybe a week confined to barracks. That’s my story. If it didn’t happen I can’t help it. It wasn’t me who thought it up in the first place.’
The story called for another glass and then my father went to the storyteller’s house to sample what he had in for Christmas. My mother warned my father as he went out the door not to come back with the signs of drink on him. ‘Everyone is for the altar in the morning,’ she reminded him. I stole into bed, thinking of the naked soldier going along the road in the dark and the old man lying dead with one eye blinking. It was dark in the room now. All the candles had been quenched except the one in the kitchen window, which would be left lighting all night and the fire kept in. That was the custom as Sigerson Clifford remembered it:
Don’t blow the tall white candle out,
But leave it burning bright,
To show that they are welcome here
This holy Christmas night.
Leave the door upon the latch,
And set the fire to keep,
And pray that they will stay with us
When all the world’s asleep.
There was a picture of Mary and Joseph in the kitchen. In the clothes they were wearing I couldn’t imagine them walking down Bohar Vass in the dark. My mother believed in their presence about us tonight and every night. My father didn’t. I once heard him say, ‘If that holy pair passed our house on Christmas night, they’d have strayed a tidy step from the road to Bethlehem!’
It was still dark when my mother called us in the morning to go to early Mass. My father was dressed and ready for the road when we came down to the kitchen. We had put our stockings hanging on the crane by the fire the night before. There was a small mouth-organ in mine. In other stockings we found a Jew’s harp, a small doll, an orange and a new penny. Father Christmas didn’t break his heart but we were satisfied with what we got. Our own father had the pony tackled and under the trap. He was fixing a short piece of candle in the lantern to light us on our way. We all piled in, my mother holding the smallest one in her lap. It was pitch dark and we noticed the single candle lighting in the kitchen window of the houses as we drove along. The road was dry with a slight touch of frost and the clippity-clop of the mare’s hooves sounded loud and echoing in the morning air. As we neared the village there was a stream of traffic, the dismal gleam from the candle lamps throwing small pools of light on the road. Some people were in sidecars, some in common cars and a few on the lowly ass and cart. The pony was tied to a bush opposite small Bessie’s house. We all climbed out and were warned to stick together and not get lost in the dark. And it was dark, people bumping into each other and then a chorus of greetings as men and women recognised each other. ‘Happy Christmas, Con!’ ‘Happy Christmas, Julia!’
The only light in the chapel was the light from the altar candles and from the shrines of the Blessed Virgin and the Sacred Heart. We couldn’t see the rafters of the church and could only barely make out the figures in the big picture of the Assumption into Heaven on the wall behind the altar. The priest and the altar boys looked like shadows when they came from the sacristy. It didn’t matter that it was dark because very few read from prayer books; they told their beads. The sermon was very short. The priest wished us a very happy Christmas and said a few words about the nativity and the coming of Christ. Nearly everyone received when it came to holy communion. My father was unaccustomed to the trip from the bottom of the chapel to the altar, but he always went at Christmas and at Eastertime. He and the other men seemed awkward and ill at ease approaching the light at the rails and were happy when they were back in their old place again, kneeling on one knee and telling their beads.
The dawn was breaking as we emerged from Mass. The men stood outside the gate facing the chapel in lines of three or four deep and took out their pipes. The women moved towards their carts and sidecars or collected in bunches talking and exchanging Christmas greetings. The day brightened and the lone vigil candle was still lighting in Pakie Richie’s window.
The hunger picked us as we drove home. Except for the few small children we were all receiving and had been fasting since the night before. The kitchen fire was still in and when we added a few sods of turf and sticks it was soon blazing again. Back rashers cut from a flitch of bacon hanging from the joist had been steeping to wash some of the salt away. They were put in the pan with eggs and a circle of black pudding. Slices of shop bread, it being Christmas time, were toasted at the fire and buttered. ‘Eat enough now,’ my mother advised. ‘It will be late before I’ll have the dinner ready.’
Darkness had come and all the candles were lighting again before it was on the table, and by that time the postman had called.
He was always late on Christmas Day. Jer, the postman, was in high good humour from sampling a little of the season’s cheer in the many houses along the way. In the front carrier of his bicycle he had a big parcel for us from our aunts in Dittmar’s Boulevard, Astoria, New York. It had small items of wearing apparel, a tie for my father, a colourful apron for my mother, a cotton dress for my sister and knee breeches and jacket with a belt at the back for my brother and me. There was a doll and a small metal brightly painted carriage drawn by two horses with little wheels on their hooves so that we could run the carriage on the table or on the floor. There was a letter, too, with a robin redbreast Christmas card, and when the card was opened out popped three ten dollar bills, which was a small fortune to us. The letter made enquiries about our health and it was signed Mary, Margaret and Elizabeth.
On St Stephen’s day we were never allowed out in the wren. Numbers of children, three or maybe four in each party, came to our house and standing inside the door sang:
The wran, the wran, the king of all birds,
St Stephen’s day he was caught in the furze.
Up with the kettle and down with the pan,
And give us a penny to bury the wran!
They would get a penny or maybe more if we had it. As well as singing, two of them would lilt a tune and the third would dance a step. They always carried a holly sprig with a coloured paper flower or a dead wren in the middle. The candles were lit in all the windows on the night of St Stephen’s day, also on any Sunday nights that fell within Christmas and on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. New Year’s night was the night of plenty. Everyone ate enough on that night. The men used to talk of a custom of hitting a cake of bread against the open door and chanting: