A Childs Christmas in Ireland

Memories by Jack Lynch, Nora Connolly O'Brien, Martin Smyth, Dervla Murphy, Michael Hartnett, Bernadette McAliskey

TANORA AND A MOTOR CAR WITH LIGHTS

By Jack Lynch

A LITTLE WALK or lane runs roughly from west to east beside Shandon Steeple and Church and literally bisects the old graveyard attached to Shandon. This is the graveyard where the commposer of 'The Bells of Shandon', Father Prout, is buried. Lower down on the same side as the Church stands the old Skiddy's Home, happily saved from the demolisher's bull-dozer a few years ago. Just behind Skiddy's was the Greencoat School affectionately known as Bob and Joan's. It was a Church of Ireland School, and adjacent to it were the residences of the school teacher and the sexton of the Church. It was called Bob and Joan's because there were two life-sized figures of a boy and a girl on the pillars of the entrance gate. The figures are still preserved in Shandon. 'Green-coat' had the same connotation as 'Bluecoat' in Dublin. The school was for poor children who were taught the basic three R's and soine craftwork. At the other side of this walk, opposite the Church, stands the house where I was born and where I spent my childdhood and early boyhood Christmases.

Christmas meant to me much the same as it did to all the young boys and girls of the area - holidays from school, plum pudding, turkey and Tanora. Tanora was our favourite 'lemonade', but of course, this was a mis-nomer because in fact it was a most delicious orange-ade. Christmas without Tanora would be like Christmas without plum pudding and turkey.

Our house was only about ten minutes walk from Patrick's Bridge and with my brothers and/or cousins I often wandered into town on the days before Christmas when school had broken up for holidays to browse around the toy sections of the department stores in Patrick Street. When I was younger, the toy I usually asked Santa Claus to bring to me was a motor car with lights that would switch on and off. I don't think that he. always met my demand for the lights. But lights or not, the toy's windding mechanism gave up the struggle usually a few days after Christmas, and went the way of most Christmas toys.

Whatever my first choice of toy, I often got one of those long Christmas stockings with a kind of a small net-like mesh on one side which exposed to view the contents of the stocking such as bugles, paper hats, miniature toy drums, bags of sweets etc. In later boyhood years I put much more store on the monetary contributions I got from my parents and other older relatives than I did on the traditional Christmas pressents. I was then able to buy my own present, a pair of football boots or a good meccano set.

In the week after Christmas we would spend what money we had left on what we called 'four-penny hops';  that is the matinees at the picture houses like the Palace and the Coliseum. The pantomine in the old Opera House was always a must and if we were lucky we would also get to see one of the smaller pantomines in places like the Fr. Matthew Hall on the Bandon Road, away on the other side of the city.

About the mid-twenties, midnight mass was introduced in the Cathedral (or the North Chapel as it is sometimes still called) where my brothers and I were altar boys. it used to be a very impressive ceremony. The Cathedral choir, of men and boys, was directed and conducted by the old maestro, Herr Fleischmann, father of Professor Aloys Fleischmann, and their singing was augmented by the Cecilian choir (drawn from the girl's confraternity). The male choir sang from its usual 'enclosure' at the Gospel side of the altar and the female from the Gallery (now demolished) at the back of the Church. The synchronisation of the voices singing the usual Christmas hymns and carols was magnificent.

Those joyous carefree Christmas days, then as now, passed all too quickly. But they was still something to look forwardto. New Year's Eve was a special occasion around Shandon. Come midnight the famed Shandon Bells 'rang in' the New Year in their grandeur 'on the pleasant waters of the River Lee' and were answered by the sirens of the ships from their berths along the quays.

WAITING FOR JAMES CONNOLLY
By Nora Connolly O'Brien

WE STARTED PASTING together coloured paper chains in Christmas week, and worked hard to have them hung tip across our room by Christtmas Eve. Mama told us Daddy's last letter said he'd be home from the United States. Last year he had not got home at all - and it did not seem like Christmas without him.

It was now Christmas Eve. Daddy had not come. We hung our stockings on the mantlepiece and Mama said 'You've been very good girls and worked very hard to get everything done in time, but I think you should go to bed now to be up in time for early Mass, and I'll have breakfast ready when you come back. Let the stockings wait till you come home!'

Mona and I knew what the stockkings would contain: a bright new penny in the toe, an apple and an orange, two small story books and a little puzzle that Mama had found somewhere - a different one for each of us. Out of each stocking showed the handle of a peppermint stick with red and white stripes. As long as we could remember it was like that; only the puzzle and the story books were different each year.

When we got back from Mass, Mama was already busy. She had a big black iron pot in which we could hear the pudding bubbling and another one, of the fire. 'What're we cooking?' We never had chicken or turkey. 'I got a picnic ham,' she said. 'When it's finished boiling, I'll put it in the pot oven and get it crisp on top' She put cabbage into the pan when the ham had boiled, and potatoes into another saucepan, and put them on the fire again.

When they're done we'll have our Christmas dinner. We'll dress up so that we're all nice and clean in honour of Christmas Day.' 'Oh, I do wish Daddy had come!' said Mona, taking the things out of her stocking and looking at them as though she did not know what she was going to find there.

Then there was a knock on the door. I jumped up to open it, thinkking it was our uncles, Johnnie and George, who always came to see us after church on Sundays, but it wasn't. It was Daddy with a big trunk at his feet and a big smile on his face. 'Merry Christmas, my darlings!' 'Oh, James!' said Mama, 'How grand. We were just saying you weren't coming.' Daddy came in and pulled the trunk after him, kissed Mama and all of us, and held the whole lot of us in his two big arms. 'I hoped to be home for Christmas Eve but a storm delayed us, and I just got to Liverpool in time to get the Dublin boat last night. Anyway, I'm here on Christmas Day, and isn't it lovely!'

'I've got presents for you in my trunk!' He took a key out of his waisttcoat pocket and opened it. To Mama he said, 'Put this on and see if it fits you!' 'Oh , James, it's real silk!' she said, 'I can't put it on when I'm cooking the dinner!' But when in the end she did, we gazed in amazement. Mama never had a silk blouse before that we knew of - and real silk too!

Daddy gave Mona a big book all about China, and me one about America. I wished he'd given Mona's one to me because I was very interestted in China. And -little Aideen's present was a pair of real Red' Indian moccasins.

'That was a lovely dinner,Lillie,' said Daddy later as we all sat round the fire. Mama on one side, Daddy on the other, and us in the middle.

'We should have music on Christtmas day- where's my fiddle?' Mama got it out from the cupboard where she had wrapped it up in a piece of flannelette, and he put the music book on the manntlepiece and started to play 'Teddy O'Neill'. Mama sang. We did not know the words so we sang 'Merry Christmas' to the notes.

'Time for the girls to go to bed,' came all too soon. But later, from my trundle bed, I could see them sitting closer together and him putting his arm round Mama and taking her hand in his other hand.

'It was a darling Christmas,' I remember Mona saying afterwards.

SENDING LETTERS UP THE CHIMNEY TO SANTA
By Rev. Martin Smyth

DURING MY CHILDHOOD, Christmas was still a time which Presbyterians did not observe as a special festival. The weekly Sabbath, the Lord's Day, was the only day ordained by God to be kept holy. This was a long way from 1977 when some Presbyterians will find it difficult to observe the Lord's Day, because Christmas is on Sunday and some evening services will be cancelled!

It was also economically distant from inflation hit, yet booming, 1977. Those were the hungry thirties with no welfare state. As a family we knew it.

Nevertheless, Christmas was a joyful occasion. There was the excitement of decorating the house and garlanding the tree; the fun of writing 'Merry Xmas' greetings on mirrors and sending letters up the chimney to Santa. I have no recollection of any specific requests being answered or denied. It didn't really matter. Santa always called and stealthily we crept down early to the kitchen to see what he had brought. The stockings were filled - sweets, apple and orange would certainly be there. One year stands vividly in memory. There was a wonderful ranch, animals with cowboys and Indians, and an immpressive fort. There was also a bagatelle set. My brother and I were thrilled.

The evening possibly resembled Blehem best of all. The whole family cirrcle gathered at Granda Smyth's where there was no room in the inn. If one wanted a seat, a particular record being played could always get an uncle out of the house, and a seat free. 

But Christmas was not all fun and make believe, any more than the original was. There was reality in it. There would be a visit to Carnmoney cemetery to place a holly wreath on the grave of an elder brother and sister. There was sadness, but the journey on the tramcar to G1engormley and the walk down Church Road holds pleassant memories even yet.

I was not very old before the wonder of Santa was destroyed for us by a 'J ohnny-know-all' kid who assured us Santa did not exist, but there was a growing awareness that Christmas was not just a touch of mid-winter madness. The deeper meaning became clearer as we exchanged gifts in Thanksgiving for the greatest Gift of all - the Father's gift of His Beloved Son to a sinful world.

As a young teenager Christmas morning ceased to be basically a time for seeking for oneself. It became a time of meeting with other young Christians in the geriatric wards of the Belfast City Hospital. There we visited old people, gave simple gifts and sang the old familiar carols.

Then down to Great Victoria Street Presbyterian Church for a cup of soup and to join in worshipping 'Christ the new-born King'. Childhood memories are still fresh. But freshest of all is to experience a continual Christmas 'Immanuel', God is still with us. His N arne is Jesus 'for He shall save His people from 'their sins'.

PLUM PUDDING WITH OLD BRIGID
By Dervla Murphy

WHEN I WAS a child we lived, very happily, in a house so irreparably decrepit that no modern squatter would stay there overnight. Each November another layer of plaster gently fell off the kitchen walls from over-exposure to plum pudding steam. Yet my memory, practising romantic selectivity, . presents that kitchen as a cosy place - especially during mid-Winter.

As a child I seem never to have noticed the acute discomfort of the place. Sly draughts came up from damp non-foundations, through gaps between ancient flags, and blatant draughts whined through the slits between rattling window-panes and rotting frames. The long dark passage outside the kitchen door, where a row of green-coloured bells hung high on the wall, echoed with ghostly chimes. In our day those bells had never responded to the relevant buttons being pushed. But this didn't matter, as we had no parlour-maid to summon.

Instead, there was Old Brigid. ('General; good plain cook. Wages £24 a year.') Presumably she had once been assisted by some younger Brigid whom I can't remember. Old Brigid ritually opened the Christmas season on November lst by making the plum puddings while grumbling obliquely about not being allowed to make a Christmas cake. The grandparents sent a cake from Bewleys every year but Old Brigid , who had never in her life been to Dublin, despised 'them shop things'.

My earliest plum pudding-making memories are unflawed. I knelt on a chair at one end of the massive, scrubbed-white kitchen table and slighttly opened the deep drawer. Then, every time the range needed stoking, I swiftly hid a fistful of fruit.

I have never had a sweet tooth and this operation was inspired not by greed but by a predilection for outwitting authority. Most of the loot went to Tommy, my best friend, whose parents couldn't afford plum pudding.

Then came the discohcerting year when my invalid mother decided that I was old enough to help Old Brigid. I was a bone lazy and self-centred only child, allergic to every form of work. But help I did, almost shrieking with tedium as I picked my way through mountain ranges of filthy currants, sultanas and raisins.

I had a circle of well-trained relatives and friends and from the age of six onwards the shape of my Christmas presents never varied - only the size. For me the glory of Christmas morning was the sight and smell and feel of new books.

It was a dreadful thing to be forced away from those books after Christmas breakfast to be sent to Mass; a psychiaatrist might find that the reason why I so rapidly lost the faith. However, the rest of Christmas Day could be spen t blissfully, like most other days in my life at that age, reading in a corner as far removed as possible from the rest of humanity.

PURLOINED HOLLY ON THE HOLY PICTURES
By Michael Hartnett

A SHOUTING farmer with a shotgun, a few patch-trousered urchins, soaked, snotty and unrepentant, running across wet fields, arms full of holly. The long walk on the railway tracks, the sleepers treacherous and slimy, the dark station, the lamp-posts with their glittering cirrcular rainbows. We stopped at the shops' red windows, to admire toys we could never have. A few drunks waltzed by, happy and moronic. An open lorry went by to jeers and obscenities: the pluckkers. shawled and snuff-nosed on the back, on their way to a flea-filled poultry-store to pluck turkeys at nineepence a head.

Candles and paraffin-lamps did not brighten the darkness in kitchens in Maiden Street - they only made the gloom amber. The purloined holly hung on holy pictures. There were no ballloons, no paperchains, no Christmas trees. Coal was bought by the half-stone, butter by the quarter-pound and tea by the half-ounce. The country people trotted by on donkey-and-cart or ponyyand-trap with 'The Christmas' stones of sugar, pounds of tea. Women in shawls and second-hand coats from America stood at half-doors, their credit exhaustted, while the spectre of Santa Claus loomed malevolently over the slates and thatch. Members of charitable instituttions distributed turf and boots, Goddblessing the meagre kitchens, as hated as the rent-man. They stood wellldressed on the stone floors, were sirred and doffed at. They paid their workers slave wages. They looked without pity at the nailed-together chairs, the worn oilcloth-topped tables, the dead fires,

Outside, the rain fell and blew along the street. The tinkers fought. Bonfires died out in the drizzle. We were washed and put to bed, happy and undernourrished. The oldest went to midnight mass. The Latin was magic, the organ, the big choir. It always seemed like a romantic time to die.

It was a Christmas of tin soldiers, tin aeroplanes and cardboard gimcracks. We were Cisco, Batman, Johnny MaccBrown all that day. Our presents P'purties' we called them - seldom lasted longer than that day. It never snowed. There was no turkey, no plummpudding, no mince-pies. The Victorian Christmas was not yet compulsory. The very poor managed roast meat, usually mutton. Wp, often rose to two cocks. The goose was common. There was a fruit-cake, jelly and custard: the dinner of the year. I never remember drink being in the house. There were never visitors, nor were we encouraged to visit anyone. If the day had been anyyway fine, we were to be found on the footpath or in the puddles, knuckles blue.

The Wren's Day always brought frost. Small warm heads came from under rough blankets to the sound of flutes and banjos and bodhrans far up the street. We donned boot polish and lipstick and old dresses and went out to follow the Wren, tuneless chancers. We sang and giggled our way to a few bob and a glass of lemonade. The back kitchens of the pubs filled up with musicians, the musicians filled up with porter and their wives filled up with apprehension. In a few hours, winter took over again. There will never be Christmases like those again, I hope to God.

THREE WISE MEN ON THE WINDOW SILL
By Bernadette McAliskey

MOST OF MY CHILDHOOD memories are defined as 'before' or 'after' the death of my father when I was nine years old. Christmas was no exception. But Christmas being a born survivor, the fact of my father's death was incorporrated into the rituals of the season rather than having any marked effect, by our childish standards.

Christmas in our house started on Christmas Eve. The furniture was reearranged, the windows polished and a search organised for the double adaptor. By lunchtime we were ready for the ascent into the attic. The decoration box came down, coated in twelve months' dust, and the Christmas tree was dug up out of the back garden. Every year the tree stood in the same corner of the living room. The same decorations, tinsel, trimmings and lights came out of the box, which also conntained the crib, the star and the colloured rolls of crepe paper, two inches wide, which we plaited to make the ceiling decorations.

They went up first. Precariously perched on a stool, my mother, whom I am led to believe weighed seven stone the morning she married, put all of her fifteen stone weight and concentration into pinning thumb tacks into the same holes she'd put them in the year before. That done, it was the turn of the tree,

and finally, with much running in and out to see what it looked like from the street, the crib took its honoured place in the front window. The huge star with its hidden light bulb was rigged up above the stable, nothing remained before the lighting up ceremony but to solemnly place the three wise men on the back window to make their perilous journey to Bethlehem by way of the mantlepiece and the piano.

At this stage a minor skirmish would determine whose turn it was to man the light switch. That settled, my mother took her place at the piano, and struck the opening bars of 'Adeste Fideles' which between us all we managed in what passed for three part harmony. With the sounding of the 'Adeste' the tree, the star and the room were transsformed, and it was Christmas.

After my father died, the singing and the switching on of the lights were mingled with the dropping of silent tears, by my mother, and those of us old enough to notice the absence of the deep tenor voice which provided the third part of the harmony, the impendding absence of the New Year's Eve concert in which my father starred, and the fact that the huge doll's house he had made for the first Christmas, and which traditionally had pride of place under the tree had not been re-decorated since his departure.

'Santy' as we knew him, played a minor role. He always came, leaving back the doll's house spirited away for renovation, and dolls, minus arms or legs for months would be miraculously cured, and sitting around the tree sportting new outfits.

Ten years after my father's death my mother died. Santa Claus was long since a memory, but when Christmas came my sister stuffed the wrong end of the turkey, the trifle, despite my finest endeavours, finally refused to make the slightest pretence of solidifying, and at the switching on of the lights, we sang 'Adeste' without the piano, but Christtmas survived unscathed.